Tag Archives: innovation

General Legal IT

Innovation – overused conference topic or something valid to strive for?

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I looked at blockchain in my last post, I’m looking at another conference favourite in this one (it’ll be AI next I hear you say!)

The tweet above made me smile this week. And then I saw an article by Rory Sutherland in The Spectator that pretty much summed up my feeling about Legal IT at the moment. The article was entitled “We don’t need more technology, we need better technology” which is a nice summary and I could leave it there. But it was this next line that got me and links back to the title of this post:

Innovation is a two-stage process. First you discover something; then over time people discover how best to use it.

That was it for me. Think about it the technology and data in law firms is pretty much there. Yes we might need to swap it for better and new versions in some cases, but fundamentally we need to work out how better to use it. Not just the individual systems but the technology as a whole, how to get consistency so that the data in one system means the same as in another. Then we can leverage real meaning out of it. Structure the documents with actual data (no more DOC as the type, identify the final documents etc) and then be able to match that consistently with the time recorded and matter types. Keeping a consistent data model (as a slight aside I liked this initiative I saw the other day to try and get an industry standard for matter categories). All of a sudden you can get huge benefit from your firms systems. Let’s look at what we’ve got and use it better to improve how we do things rather than buy yet another product because we’re convinced that’s the one that will make all the difference!

Finally if you have read the whole article, doesn’t this ring true with every Lync implementation (I use Lync as I think this is more pertinent to where we all were, rather than now).

Then it occurred to me: the reason home video-conferencing is such a game changer is only partly about the video. Much of the magic is in the quality of the sound.

Didn’t we all trumpet the desktop video conferencing and then realise that ensuring the voice and call quality was the killer!!

 

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General IT, General Legal IT, Legal

Should we stop chasing blockchain?

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At the back end of last year I saw an excellent presentation on blockchain, a technology I have tried to keep an open mind on. But this talk kind of confirmed all my fears. Let me take you through the key parts of the talk and then I’ll leave the comments open to see whether you all come to the same conclusion or can point out what I’m missing.

Blockchain is  a distributed ledger technology.

A ledger is a essentially a list of transactions.

A hash is created for each transaction, a value that is unfeasible to reverse. So it verifies the transaction hasn’t been changed. If you then hash a “block” of these transactions with a hash record together you get a block hash. Then if you add each block hash to the next you get a ….. chain.


Then distribute these ensuring the chain is agreed between them all, the more copies the harder it is to change or fake the ledger.

That’s blockchain and so far seems pretty useful as a way of protecting data?

But if the ledger cannot change and isn’t regulated then errors cannot change either right?

But it’s good for smart contracts right? The blockchain tech makes the contract unalterable. But a bug in the code and, well back to the point that the block chain makes the contract virtually unalterable ie impossible to unpick! (something that has happened)

All technology has issues, so I get this is not a reason to dismiss the concept. But unless you have zero trust in other parties and require unalterable data and where regulation or law doesn’t help, I can’t help think a standard secure database can do the job you’re after?!

Pretty much what the Australian Government said, this is a quote from Peter Alexander, Chief Digital Officer at Australia’s Digital Transformation Agency :Oh and one more reason blockchain technology like bitcoin may not be worth pursuing : “Bitcoin Mining Now Consuming More Electricity Than 159 Countries Including Ireland & Most Countries In Africa” source

To me the key question then is simply why do you need a distributed ledger, especially laws firms as it kind of removes the need for them in the transaction. If both parties agree a contract on a distributed ledger, you’re pretty much saying it doesn’t matter if we don’t trust the other we’ve an unalterable contract without the need for a middle man. Maybe it just shifts everything from transaction law to litigation? And if you actually still need the lawyer to create the contract then why not just put it in a secure database of the law firm?

Thoughts?

Oh and a big credit to Paul D Johnston who’s original presentation on what is blockchain was the jump off point of pretty much all of the above!

 

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General Legal IT, Legal

Legal Tech question: Is the abundance of lawyers stifling innovation?

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Like at many other legal technology conferences, I’m sure that at ILTA last week in the US there was lots of questions about the billable hour, questions on when law firms are going to change and a good use of the good old buzzword “innovation”.

In fact a quick twitter search and I can find a few quotes from sessions:

But what if the big thing that is really holding everything back isn’t a lack of desire or an inability to do so? Maybe it’s much more simple than that. This thought crossed my mind when I came across this article on UK productivity over the summer break, in particular this part:

“if you provide an economy with an almost endless supply of cheap labour as the UK government has, employers will use it instead of investing in any kind of productivity raising automation?”

I thought maybe this is it for law firms. There is certainly not a shortfall of the number of people entering law, in fact there are probably more than is needed. So are we simply seeing this over supply play through firms? Yes I know there are some exciting ventures into automation and machine learning, but I wonder whether they are mainly driven by marketing the firm than real productivity drivers in the firm?

I would be interested in hearing comments and thoughts, to me it doesn’t yet feel like we’ve hit the tipping point as we did in personal injury and insurance work. A point that really accelerated the use of case management technology in the late 90’s and led to boosted productivity and huge competition in that sector.

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General Legal IT, Legal

Lawyers coding – are we belittling the IT developers skills?

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There have been a few articles in the legal press about lawyers training in coding and I’ve been meaning to write a blog about it for a while, I’ve just had a voice in the back of my head saying “Surely this isn’t the solution to the alleged problem with legal and technology”, one professional doesn’t solve a problem by retraining as another surely? I mean Tesco and Sainsbury’s didn’t retrain their checkout staff as coders when they decided they needed to move into online selling did they? OK I know that is a little beyond what is happening in legal, but it crudely highlights the point.

Reason I have taken time to write this is that I don’t want to sound like a Luddite and a dismisser of change, but equally I really dislike the notion that you can simply train to be a coder and develop secure, scalable applications. It belittles those that have spent years learning, developing their skill and gaining a huge amount of experience building applications. A whole profession of developers and other IT professionals.

I think there are huge benefits of gaining a knowledge of technology in any profession and wholeheartedly welcome developing this knowledge in lawyers. I equally think law firms could do a huge amount to develop the knowledge of IT professionals in the practice of law, something that doesn’t get the airtime in the legal press. Innovation will come by looking at the problems and utilising the whole workforce to solve them in new ways, not by simply retraining those that frankly are the core to any law firm, the lawyers.

I think this quote for me shows where the right balance is (full article here):

“If you want to be a lawyer who knows what technology can do then you should learn to code – or at least have an understanding of coding. Which is different to learning to code. As a Spanish-speaker I can read a book in Italian but I couldn’t write a book in Italian.”

It’s understanding the language, but trusting the native speakers when you need to write the book. At the moment for me (at least in the legal press narrative) the current trend seems to dismiss the natives. Get the balance right though and there could be some great solutions to the challenges ahead!

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General Legal IT, Legal

Experience in Artificial Intelligence – lessons for Legal IT in 2017

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To start 2017 I thought I’d have a quick look at 2016’s favourite Legal IT topic, Artificial Intelligence (AI). Reason for picking this topic is down to two pieces of technology that I brought into our household at the end of last year that utilise AI heavily. Those are Nest and Alexa.

The former has brought home to me what I think is going to be a key issue in adoption of AI in law firms, that is trust. My Nest thermostat “learns” over time and one of the key aspects of this is watching for when you go out of the house, the system then reacts by turning thee heating down. At the same time it triggers my Nest security camera to turn on. Over Christmas though I’ve noticed, on odd occasions, when we were out that the camera would turn on but the thermostat wouldn’t drop the temperature. Other times though it would, there seemed to be no consistency. After a lot of old style IT troubleshooting and a lot of googling, I eventually found that this wasn’t a bug, but that Nest had learnt patterns and our locations and kept the heating on when it thought our trip was local and brief, thus in its mind turning off the heating was less efficient (as otherwise it would need to heat the whole house from scratch on our return). The camera though it realised should be on immediately.

This is my trust point, until I fully understood what was going on I didn’t trust the technology. I thought it was just not working, so I had taken to manually overriding the settings when we went out. In reality it was working very well and actually better at predicting things that would save energy than I was! This issue though will be the same with Legal IT AI, getting the trust will take time and will probably need a full understanding of how the machine is learning before people will accept AI into the mainstream functions.

Alexa to me is voice recognition starting to become useful, moving from the smartphone (Siri) or the computer (Cortana) to being “in the room” makes so much sense and is much more useful. Whether it’s controlling the lights or simply putting on some music it genuinely is useful rather than a gimmick. It is impressive how Alexa is using all the data it is gathering to improve, however it also shows how far AI has to go in terms of human interaction. It is way beyond having to specifically phrase your commands or questions, but there is so far to go to get beyond a few “skills” it has now.

These two areas fuel my scepticism around AI. No that’s not fair,  it’s not scepticism it’s just wanting an injection of reality into AI within Legal. I am impressed with Alexa and Nest and the more I use them the more I get impressed by the learning, however my expectations for the technology (particularly for Alexa) were not overoptimistic. I think if we adopt a realistic approach for AI in Legal in 2017 then it can and will be a great enabling technology for firms. If we don’t temper the hype though, we’ll be disappointed or fail to trust it and it’ll go in the bin for years before we try it again!

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General Legal IT

eSignatures – no nothing to do with vaping!

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Following on from my Uber post on innovative IT solutions, I wanted to look at one of those “been around for ages” technologies in Legal IT that is rarely used in anger yet could be a simple solution, that maybe not ground breaking, would add a real consumer feel to technology in law firm transactions. I’ve been meaning to put this post up after seeing a product in this category again and also hearing from an in-house lawyer team from a large global corporate at the recent ILTA Insight conference.

“Technological innovation is the next step…..simple solutions like e-signature to make sure its used in every context across our global legal community…..through to evaluation of AI tools”

So in the same breath as Artificial Intelligence (surely the buzzword of the year in LegalIT!) a solution that’s been around for ages is mentioned. But rarely does it get mentioned alongside big data and AI within law firms as an sexy “innovative” solution.

So what are eSignatures?

The product that I’ve seen in action recently is Docusign, however it’s perhaps the most boring of tech demoes you’ll see (not the fault of those running the demo!). Simply, like a traditional signature, eSignatures are symbols or other data in digital form attached to an electronically transmitted document as verification of the sender’s intent to sign the document. So the demo for Docusign is integrated into a document signing process, it’s slick and so like a lot of simple solutions doesn’t seem that much. (There is some more info here on exactly how it works: https://www.docusign.co.uk/products/electronic-signature/how-docusign-works)

Adobe Sign is another example with a nice little demo on their site to give you an idea of the process (https://www.adobesigndemo.com/uk/demo/send)

And this year (2016) saw the UK legislation implementing the EU directive 2014, this should be implemented by all 28 member states and so allow cross jurisdiction eSigning. What happens to the UK post Brexit who knows, but I suspect it’ll be some time before our legislation deviates from all the EU directives.

There is a lot of information that is worth reading about how the verification process can work to ensure that the person signing is who you think it is, however sometimes I wonder why we don’t worry as much about fraud and crime in the “paper” world as we do in the “cyber” world. Faking a signature or taking copies of a paper file have virtually no security wrapped around them! But that’s a topic for another day!

So why isn’t it widespread?

Tools like eSignature, document automation, speech recognition and others seem to have been around in some form or other since I came into Legal IT in the second half of the 1990’s. And I think one of the difficulties has always been about engagement with the right teams in the business and also trying to measure and justify the cost. The former is more a challenge in areas like document automation where a lawyers time is needed, this isn’t an “IT product implementation project” it’s business process change to get the real value documents automated. The latter though fits with eSignatures, unless you’re a volume business and you can measure a simple ROI (return on investment) against the cost of say postage or another tangible measure in huge numbers, it’s difficult to see the areas where monetary value could be tracked. But maybe this is it, maybe we need to look at value as something other than £’s, $’s or €’s. Something like the simplicity and feel that a client would get on being able to apply a simple online signature, rather than a paper one. In the consumer world when was the last time you signed a T & C’s document when purchasing something or had to wait for the “paperwork”?

Sometimes it’s the simple things that can give huge value. To quote Steve Jobs “We’ve got to make the small things unforgettable”.

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General Legal IT

Legal IT vendors you’re not Uber, you’re just cost cutters

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If there is one company that gets thrown into conference presentations on “disruption” in law firms more than any other it’s Uber. So is Uber really disruptive or is it just innovative?

“A disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network, displacing established market leading firms, products and alliances.”

In my city it hasn’t displaced established firms or products, I suspect in some cities it has started to put existing firms out of business. But anyway that’s not the point of the article, what I often thought when hearing these talks was what actually are the key aspects to Uber’s popularity? The things that make us use them above other taxi firms? And then how would you achieve the same in a law firm?

For me personally Uber does the following:

  1. Fixes the “the driver is just round the corner” or “the driver is 10mins away” excuses when you asked a dispatcher where the taxi was. You now know exactly where the taxi is and how long you have to wait for it to arrive.
  2. Convenience of booking. No remembering numbers or what the local taxi is. It works how we work, online. A phone is now a computer and no longer a, well a phone.
  3. Lack of taxis during busy periods. Surge pricing is a big incentive to get drivers on the roads, meaning more taxis and less waiting.
  4. Lower cost. But, and it’s a big but, I think is the least important. It’s great it’s a bit cheaper but the above three would encourage me to continue using Uber regardless of a cheaper price.

And it was that last one that got me thinking that the focus in a lot of legal conferences is all about reducing the cost. Using AI to do due diligence to reduce cost, using document automation to churn through documents faster to reduce cost, automating processes to reduce cost, use legal delivery centres to reduce cost.

What we need to do is find the equivalent of the first three, what are the niggles that clients feel everytime they use a law firm? It’s not necessarily an IT solution that a Legal IT vendor can sell. It is more likely to be a simple niggle that every client is facing when dealing with law firms.

In a competitive market keeping costs low and building your market share is important, but the disruptive firm is going to find that problem to solve that’s not about cost saving but getting rid of that annoyance that many clients are facing.

And Legal IT vendors, stop advertising your tech, however innovative it is, as something that’ll disrupt and simply point out it’ll cut costs! This isn’t a bad thing in itself.

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