No option for Law Firm

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!

Anyone use Spotify? For those that don’t it is a service that allows you to play thousands of music tracks for free (with adverts) or for a small monthly cost (without adverts).

It recently launched a new version of its application that integrates a range on new social features.

So what’s this got to do with Legal IT? Well Spotify has done what a whole host of legal IT vendors have done for years, they’ve gone and over complicated what was a very simple application!

Software vendors (and I suspect this can be levelled at Legal IT depts too!) tend to feel the need to add functionality on release of a new version. Which is fair enough, but if you do your key task extremely well (like Spotify previously) why add to it?

There is a lot to be said for just keeping applications to the functions they do well, if you want to deliver a new version maybe think ”what can we take away?”. As I quoted in a previous post : “Perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”, Antoine de Saint Exupéry.