No Option for Law Firm

Next I think bespoke systems (or at least flexible systems) will start to make a come back. Remember Hatton Blue anyone? The modern versions of this and the rise of ABS law firms will see firms look at their processes and find more efficient ways to do things. This will be much more than case management software, more a mix of case management, online communication and document automation.

Cloud storage I think will be a big topic still through 2013. In particular for Legal IT it will be a specific cloud offering that will be all the rage, a simple dropbox or skydrive type solution. In this area in Legal there are two big players that already have their hat in the ring. Workshare’s SkyDox and HP Autonomy’s LinkSite, at the moment I think the later just has the edge. But there are also smaller vendors offering integration of your DMS into products like box.net. I’ll put up a blog post about this in the coming weeks.

And finally that big one, Windows 8 makes it to the top of my top 5 for 2013. Sure no law firm will run a desktop refresh with Windows 8, but all those replacement laptops and desktops at home WILL come with Windows 8. People will use it and (eventually) start to realise the potential, software vendors will write for it and the hybrid laptop/tablets will start to become the big BYOD item of 2013. Law firms by the end of the year will need to cater for Windows 8 whether they like it or not!

So that’s it my top 5 for 2013.

5 – Death of the BlackBerry, rise of the other three (iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8) in law firms

4 - BYOD

3 – Bespoke systems (Q: are they still 4GL’s??) make a comeback

2 – Cloud storage, specifically ”Legal dropbox”

1 – Windows 8

I did my review yesterday so let’s crack on and look at what I think will be emerging technology for Legal in 2012 or that will be technology that will feature heavily in Legal in 2012.

Speech Recognition : Yes I know I predicted this in 2010 but I really think we will start to see more uptake of this technology in Legal. It’ll creep more into consumer and as such we’ll become more acustomed to speaking to machines. Read more of my thoughts on speech recognition in this post from November last year.

Windows Phone/Android/iPhone : Or more to the point, the death of the blackberry in Legal. After years of being the corporate tool of choice (remember when having a BB was a bit of a status symbol!!), RIM through major failure of service and also taking their eye off what they were really good at (email access) have gone the way of the fax machine. As for the replacement? Well the last two on the list are obvious, but I’m sticking my neck on the line and predicting the order as written! I’ll post up why I think this in an future post.

SharePoint : Now this is a tricky one. I’m going to sit on the fence for a little longer here as to which way it will go, but in 2012 I think we’ll conclude one way or the other whether or not SharePoint will or will not become a viable Legal DMS (Document Management System).

The return of the laptop/netbook : not that they ever really went away. I read a great post before Christmas that really chimed, it was entitled “If you want to look old, get an iPad”. I gauged my 9 year old’s opinion as to which tech he’d prefer, answer a laptop. Apparently roblox doesn’t work on an iPad! Seriously though, the iPad is nice kit and until I upgraded my Smartphone from Windows Mobile (old version) I hankered after one. But now, I’m with Larry’s 27 year old son (albeit a bit older!) I think they will have a place but for me a lightweight ultrathin laptop would be preferable and I think more will start to feel the same.

A new vendor emerging as a major Legal IT player : to me the market is ripe for a new Legal focussed player to emerge. I’m not sure where, but there seem to be plenty of opportunities for technology focus in Legal that aren’t being addressed or existing technology that is perhaps being forgotten as the traditional players diversify into other verticals. Now vendors don’t go spamming my comments with products, as I won’t allow them through! But feel free to let us know why you think this might be you without product placement.

That’s my top 5, nothing revolutionary for this year (although predicting Wp7 as a major player could be seen as beyond revolutionary!). There are things from the last few years that will continue in 2012, Office 2010 becoming the default platform and IM continuing to proliferate around Legal. But these feel more business as usual now. So, I’ve kept it fairly generic and it is probably geared more at mid sized firms and above. But would love to hear your comments on the above or what you think will be big in 2012 (especially from those in smaller firms).

Before I take my annual look of emerging technology for Legal in 2012 or technology that will feature heavily in Legal in 2012, let’s review what I thought would be key things over the last couple of years.

My 2010 list was as follows:

• Mobile Applications
• Search
• Office 2010/Windows 7
• Instant Messaging
• Speech Recognition

And then in 2011 was:

• Glue Tech
• Microsoft Lync
• YouTube
• Mobile Applications
• Office 2010 and Windows 7

Now given the similarity between the lists it’s clear that things don’t move at a fast pace across the whole of Legal. But I didn’t do a bad job (alright some were bleeding obvious, but they still caught some Legal IT vendors on the back foot. Office 2010 anyone?)

Off the mark! OK YouTube hasn’t been the success I thought, but elsewhere it’s going where I thought it would (see YouTube in Schools), it makes sense to me and so maybe soon we’ll see something appear. Maybe one of the Legal IT vendors (HP Autonomy hint hint) could provide a YouTube channel with product videos (like WorkSite how-tos for example!!). Glue Tech is one to watch still, there is use of this technology of course, but I thought there would be a real rush to this last year. Speech Recognition I think I was a couple of years too early and Search, well let’s put that down as a bad idea!

Mobile Apps,  well the apps themselves haven’t really been making waves in Legal as I thought . Sure there are a few Legal specific ones out there, but I was thinking more of an internal Marketplace/Appstore for firms own apps. But there certainly is a move by lawyers to more personal/consumer devices (iOS, Android, WP7) and away from the controlled blackberry environment which may speed this up over the next couple of years.

Microsoft Lync/IM, now this is taking off in firms. It feels to me like email circa 1995 at the moment, contacting someone in the firm is now easy but outside is still a bit tricky and clunky. I’m sure we’re almost at a tiping point and corporate IM will explode like email did in the late 90′s.

Office 2010/Windows 7, come on who hasn’t implemented something or at least started a project to implement these two? For UK firms it was obvious this was going to happen, almost all of us were Office 2003 and XP and so it was bound to happen. Why then were so many Legal IT vendors caught out and behind the release of Office 2010? I could fill a blog post with the problems we found along the way, mainly with plug-ins to Office from 3rd parties causing issues!

Tomorrow I’ll take a look at 2012!

This is just a short post to point out a great blog post I read the other day about in-house lawyers. What struck me was the similarity between in-house lawyers and their customers and IT departments and their customers.

It was this section that made me smile:

People who don’t speak to customers that often (and this gets worse the more senior that person is) are prone to taking every complaint that they do hear at face value. After all, if it wasn’t serious they wouldn’t have called the boss, would they?

So where more a experienced complaint wrangler has a range of techniques for getting angry people off the line so that they can do a proper investigation of the issues, the senior manager can think of nothing else but an immediate promise that Something Will Be Done. Thus expectations are raised and the lives of minions made harder.

It’s a generalisation of course and the seniority isn’t necessarily the issue in IT departments. But this does happen (I can even see where I’ve done it myself!) and you end up chasing problems that affect only a few people or delay other projects that could benefit many.

This week I caught the news that the ZX81 hit 30 and that got me thinking about the computers I have owned.

• Commodore PET 2001
• Sinclair Spectrum 48K
• Atari 520STFM

Then the fun went out of computers. I mean take a look at the next lot. (don’t believe me, pull out the internet cable and see what you can do with that thing on your desk!)

• PC (386 laptop with a massive 8 inch b&w screen)
• PC (486 compaq from work)
• PC (self built Athlon)
• PC (water cooled over clocked P4)
• PC (i5)

That first Commodore started me on the path to an IT career in applications development. Developing software in BASIC was the only way I could get that PET to do anything useful. The early days of the Spectrum as well led to plenty of coding, mainly due to the magazines at the time having code listings for games and projects. Also the plethora of magazines like INPUT (TV advert), that taught programming for the Spectrum and Commodore 64 amongst others.

These were the early days of home computing when there were many different machines, each with their own operating system. These machines had languages either built in or shipped with them on disks that allowed kids to experiment in programming.

Then came the PC (and to a lesser extent in the early days the Mac) and years of same old same old, with some improvements and iterations in the OS and just a little be faster hardware in each release.

So apart from a little nostalgia what’s the point in this post?

Well it’s tablets. The multiple different devices, the lack of standard operating system, the explosion in software development for them. It reminds me a little of the early days of home computing. The explosion of Apps is encouraging people to develop again. This could lead to a whole new generation of developers who enjoy coding, rather than build a web site in the hope of being the next Mark Zuckerberg.

From the developers of my generation came most of the stalwarts of the current Legal IT portfolio. The developers that come from tablet generation will maybe bring the next wave. I hope so, Legal IT software to me seems old and tired at the moment. It’s iterations of what we have already, better but not revolutionary.  Maybe the tablet will bring the change?

Another week another outsourcing of legal support staff story, or so it seems in 2011. At the time of writing the latest is Allen & Overy and their move to outsource to Belfast. This follows other firms, like CMS Cameron McKenna giving it’s support staff the choice of Bristol or India.

It’s like the mid 90’s all over again. Well for me it is. At that time I was starting off in IT in the utilities industry. In the UK the government had privatised the regional electricity companies and they were suddenly in a competitive market. Very similar to the position law firms find themselves in now, a time when a fairly comfortable profitable market was suddenly plunged into an arena that was getting very competitive very fast.

The mantra was to cut costs and quickly. As a reader of Janders Dean’s blog points out “They’re doing this to cut costs aren’t they and if that means cutting some of the flab out of the headcount so be it. This is a business after all”. And as in the utilities then, it’s the same in law firms now, target headcount and target support functions.

I totally agree with the point in the quote above, that business needs to cut flab to remain competitive. And although not nice for those involved, good companies do tend to handle this well and look after the employees affected.

But it always reminds me of the story of East Midlands Electricity and what can happen if the sole focus of an outsourcing deal is money saving. You can read more details of what happened here and here, but the summary is that EME didn’t see the business changes that the deregulation of the UK’s domestic electricity and gas supply market would bring. And when those changes came they realised that there was no substitute for experience of an internal IT department and that there was a need for them to take direct control of all business-related IT projects. This led to a cancelation of a 12 year deal some 5 years early and a recreation of an IT department.

I think maybe A&O’s response is a better play, I’ve often wondered why a number of the London based UK firms persist in maintaining support functions in the capital, where the cost of offices and staff is much more expensive. So rather than outsource why not shift the functions to cheaper parts of the UK, say for example Yorkshire!!

Have you ever thought that everything clients want from a law firm are things that our fee earner want from the Legal IT dept.?

I hadn’t thought of it this way until a colleague raised a number of points that were raised by some senior people from large global organisations at a recent conference.

"We want consistent service from a global service provider, even if it isn’t in the home market, we still want the same good service in a distant geography"

"We want a legal services team that really knows our business"

"Don’t do what we tell you, do what we need"

“We don’t want academic legal answers, we want relevant business explanations and solutions”

Change the wording slightly.

"We want consistent service from the central IT dept., even if it isn’t in our office, we still want the same good service in a distant geography"

"We want a legal IT team that really knows our business"

"Don’t do what we tell you, do what we need"

“We don’t want technical answers, we want relevant business explanations and solutions”

Makes sense doesn’t it!

Now I’ve been pondering how to sum this post up. Is there an answer to all the problems of delivering a great service in those points raised? I couldn’t come up with a nice black and white answer, but then maybe this is a case of a problem shared is a problem solved?

p.s. thanks must go to my colleague in Asia for this post, the points are plagiarised from him. cheers Andy!

I read a couple of articles last year, one on the demise of corporate IT and another on how corporate IT has the same reputation as Carol Beer (the bank manager in the BBC’s Little Britain hit sketch show, “computer says no”). I agree with some of the sentiments in both of these articles, but not in the conclusion, that this is going to lead to the end of corporate IT in the former article or that this is generally the case that “IT says no” in the later. Here’s my response as to why.

Does the Corporate Legal IT dept need to be dragged into the future?

I spoke to one board level client who was stunned when he moved to his new company that he was unable to use his own laptop and iPad. The IT department instead set him up with a desktop that made him feel like he had been transported five years back in time.

But then I could as easily quote from an article like this one:

A company that runs two law centres has become one of the first two organisations ever to be fined for data protection breaches, after personal details of 24,000 clients were lost when an unencrypted laptop was stolen.

There are reasons that your work PC can be a pain compared to your modern quad core home laptop. But often there are very good reasons for this based on decisions that have been taken by the firm as a whole. It’s a balance and although I would wholly agree with the sentiment that corporate IT has to “say yes”, I’d also argue that it’s the business as a whole that needs to be dragged into the future as well and see IT once again as an enabler for the firm rather than just a utility service. See it as a former and you start to make joint decisions on what you want from IT for the firm, as the later it just becomes something you use.

So what about the End of the Corporate Legal IT dept?

Certainly Legal IT will change due to the three factors outlined in the article: 

• The corporate acceptance of SaaS
• The explosion of consumer technology
• The economy

But it will change rather than die. Much as I’m sure that from the outside it can look like corporate IT is a dinosaur waiting for extinction, this is a generalisation. Most Legal IT depts are very used to change (they’ve been through enough of them in the last 10 years! Mergers, Growth, Recession, Globalisation etc) and so these factors will lead them to change yet again.

• SaaS, yes it’s great but it still needs managing, it still needs analysis of the business needs/requirements, it still needs project management for implementing the service.
• Consumer technology, Apple stuff still breaks you know and needs tech support.
• The economy, if there’s one department that knows how to cut costs it’s IT!

So that’s my thoughts on these articles, what’s yours?

Happy New Year to you all!

Hope you had a good 2010 and I wish you all a great 2011. As per last year I thought I’d try a prediction of the technology areas that I will be big for Legal IT in 2011, so here it is my top 5 2011 list of legal IT technologies.

At #5 we have a new entry: More a grouping of technologies I’ve termed "Glue Tech”. The technology that sits between one or more core Legal IT services. Technology like IntApp that uses information in existing systems and applies logic to other systems. Also bespoke developed applications to join systems in ways that provide extra benefit for the lawyer. I also include workflow and case management applications like VisualFiles in this category, a recent visit to a smaller law firm highlighted some of the benefits joined up applications in VisualFiles can make to a business process.

Down two places at #4 we have Microsoft Lync. I think the instant messaging aspect of lync will continue to push into law firms in 2011, especially with the introduction of Office 2010. But the other features of Lync may take longer than 2011 to become widespread in law firms.

New in at #3 is a technology that will be very familiar, but maybe new to law firms and that is YouTube. Or at least similar online video capabilities, this has huge potential for IT training etc. Think about it, if you’ve a tech problem at home who hasn’t searched for a how-to video from YouTube?

Up three places to this years #2 is Mobile Applications. The Smartphone is here, the iPad is on a march and with Android and BlackBerry tablets are starting to come to market. That mobile application market that has exploded in the consumer arena is surely ready to crack the business market. We just need to crack the risk/IT security aspect to it!

And up two to take this years #1 spot is Office 2010 and Windows 7. Sure it’s not sexy tech and yes it’s Microsoft centric. No, it’s not social or cloud computing, but it is the bread and butter stuff of law firms whether you like it or not. Office 2003 and Windows XP need to retire and this is the year.

So the top tech in legal IT may not be cutting edge, but it reads to me like a true corporate IT list. Nothing frivolous, but no longer 5 years behind. Behind these applications I suspect there will be a push for technologies to control the vast amounts of data law firms are now generating, whether this is cloud or self hosted I’m not sure. If the legal and risk aspects can be ironed out then maybe cloud will start to grow.

As for social computing? I don’t think there will be any killer application that makes it’s way into Legal, but all the top five will bring some degree of social computing with them.

So that’s my five, am I on the mark or way off? Let me know in the comments.

So the end of a another year of blogging. I started this blog at the start of 2009, right at the start of real turmoil in the Legal market. The worst recession in decades was in full swing and law firms were in a massive restructuring exercise that for some is still going on some two years later.

Over those two years in terms of Legal IT we’ve seen some of the big names of the past consolidate, some new players emerge and Legal IT become less niche in terms of IT and move closer to the main stream in terms of technology and demands on the IT departments.

In terms of this blog it’s been more successful than I could have imagined, it now averages about 1500 visits per month to the site and about 230 subscribers each day to the RSS feed. And this year I was short listed for the Computer Weekly blog awards.

So all that remains for this year is to take a look at my predictions for the top 5 Legal IT technologies of 2010 made at the start of the year.

#5 Mobile Applications

Well given the proliferation of iPads at ILTA and the rise of the Android and iPhone’s I would say I was right on the mobile device being big in 2010. But what about the Applications? Well until the devices become more widespread I don’t think there will much more than email or document access applications in law firms (there of course are plenty of Apps that can and will be used by lawyers as personal productivity applications).

#4 – Search

Lots of talk in 2010, with a few firms bringing in pilots for enterprise search.  Cost, integration and the “separate application” is holding this back I suspect. For those firms though who are iManage customers the IDOL engine is being introduced as part of their WorkSite 8.5 upgrades, this will bring experience of a major enterprise search engine to those depts.

#3 – Office 2010/Windows 7

Now this may not be “live” in many firms in 2010, but who hasn’t started looking at one of both of these products during 2010?

#2 Instant Messaging

Starting to make waves in 2010. It will be a slow uptake (a bit like email was back in the early 90’s) but like email I’m sure it will take hold. Maybe Lync will bring it front and centre next year?

#1 Speech Recognition

Well I was wrong on this one! Maybe more lawyers typing their own documents combined with good workflow in Digital Dictation systems is enough to cope with the shift in secretarial/fee earner ratios?

So that’s it, I may have been slightly off the mark with some technologies. But the others, maybe I was just a little early but they are starting to make it into some law firms. What do you think? Leave me some comments on what you think have been the main technologies making their mark in Legal in 2010.

So finally to finish 2010 a thank you to Legal IT Professionals who kindly publish my content on their site. And a big thank you to all who read and comment both here and over there. I hope you all have a great Christmas and New Year!