No option for Law Firm

When I started work for a utilities company during a placement year from university in 1991/92, all personal calls from your desk telephone were banned. If you wanted to make a personal call you had to use the office payphone. That’s right you had to wander out of the office to a payphone that for us was located on a different floor at the other end of the office. Sounds ludicrous now doesn’t it? I can’t recall the exact reason given at the time, but I’m sure cost and time wasting were quoted.

So I have a wry smile when I see articles like this one “One in Two U.K. Companies Block Social Networking Web Sites”.

To me the banning of social sites is just a ludicrous as the scenario I encountered in 1991. The common reasons for blocking given are:

1. Time wasting costing firms money
2. Legal risks, i.e. disclosure of confidential or proprietary information

For both blocking sites to me seems totally ineffective. In the age of Smartphones and Netbooks with wireless internet access (either WiFi or 3G) employees can and will use their own personal devices to access sites if they can’t from their work PC.

To me more effective methods are:

1. For the first, surely a much simpler and effective answer is to manage your staff. This was what the utility industry had decided for the telephone by the time I returned to take a full time role in 1993.
2. Surely a good policy written to explain to employees what is expected of them in terms of posting online? If you want to start one for your firm take a look at this great resource of social media policies.

I know first hand how social media can be a big distraction if not managed (I’ve started turning off my RSS reader during the day for this very reason), but it can also be a valuable source of information if used the right way. For law firms, in an age where we need lawyers to be as “clued up” as possible on social networks (see my last post!), banning them seems a step backwards!

So what does your firm do? Post in the comments and let us know (you can leave the firm name out if you wish).

Did you see the #trafigura storm on twitter yesterday? It was down to the “Guardian gagged” story in the press (Go over the editors blog post for a good synopsis of what went on or if you want a shorter version take a look at Peninsulawyer’s post)

Now I’m not going to get into political commentary (if you want to read the political blogosphere’s take on the story try Iain Dale or Guido Fawkes blogs) or touch on the legal ramifications, I wanted to do a quick post on it from a Legal IT point of view.

In fact one twitter post stood out for me yesterday and this kind of sums up my thoughts:

The Carter-Ruck/Guardian/Trafigura press censorship story is classic example of what happens when old time lawyers meet Web 2.0 media

It’s not about actually using web 2.0. I really don’t believe that every lawyer should have a blog, be on facebook or linked in, update twitter, use instant messaging (IM). To me these are all just tools, just as the old telephone is. In fact think about it, you wouldn’t evangelise about the telephone and how everyone really must use it would you? People either use it or they don’t. The key point is that they know what it is and what it is useful for (and as important what it’s useless for).

The same goes with blogs, micro blogs, wikis, social networking, IM etc. Lawyers need to know what it is, how it is used and how it is now mainstream (don’t believe me? Read “Youth can’t live without web” and “Finland makes broadband legal right“). If they choose to use it great, but it doesn’t matter as long as they know and understand what it is.

And this is where I believe Legal IT departments can help.

I remember, back in the late 90′s when the Internet was still fairly new, doing a series of presentations with a colleague around our firms UK offices. The aim was to talk to lawyers about the technology behind the web. This was mainly for technology and media lawyers, but it was giving them an insight into the technologies that their clients would be talking about. This is what law firm IT people need to be doing now. Not necessarily advocating they use it, but talking to lawyers and helping them to understand the web 2.0 technologies, how they are used and in this case how it is impossible to “gag” a story anymore (the “Streisand effect”).

Final thought, the term “web 2.0″ or “new media”. Is it me or does this seem really dated? Surely it’s just “web” and “media” now?

I’m a strong advocate of Flexitime, I used to work in an environment where it was available and I still miss the benefits ten years on. For an employee it is a great way to get that work life balance as well as generally making you feel more productive (you put in the hours when your work demands it rather than just when the clock tells you to).

I see from today’s Legal Week that Allen & Overy are looking at an initiative to bring in flexible working. Now whether this is a true move to flexitime for all staff (including support staff),  just general flexibility for partners or meeting the 2003 legislation for parents you can’t really tell from the article. But the fact it’s in the press to me shows at least law firms are starting to think about it.

Looking at Legal IT in particular, what are the benefits of flexitime? As well as the afore mentioned obvious benefits to the employee it also has benefits for the employer.

Key at the moment are the cost savings you could get immediately by extending the core hours:

Say your current hours are a usual 9 to 5. To get staff to work long after 5 you’ll either have to have very well motivated willing staff or more likely you’ll have to pay overtime.

In a flexitime environment you could extend core hours to 6 to 8 (staff chose which 7/7.5 to work in this time), staff know that if at busy periods they work a 10 hour+ day they will be able to work shorter days when it isn’t busy. The employer gets the savings in reduced overtime pay.

Another benefit of the extended core hours is you widen your coverage in the day for customers as some will rather come in early and some will rather stay late.

Productivity usually increases as people maximise the work when it is required. They will put in the effort to reach milestones, get pieces of work done etc as they know that in the lulls they can claw the time back.

Personally I think the UK has an unhealthy focus on just the hours you’re in the office. These being more important than the work you do in those hours. Two stories stick in my mind regarding this:

• First was from a friend of mine who went to work in Germany, he told me the story of a British manager who had gone to work for the same company. The manager did the usual British thing of staying in the office late, after a few weeks his boss had pulled him to one side and told him if he couldn’t do the work in the hours allotted he clearly wasn’t the man for the job.
• The second I heard was of a manager who spoke up when challenged by the boss on the reasons why there was no one in the office late. Clearly this was an indicator that the dept needed to be busier. The manager responded by asking whether he (the boss) wanted an office where people came in and simply sat at their desks from 7 to 7 or where people were in (maybe for less time) but got the job done?

Yes there are times when extra hours are needed to get jobs done, but as I’ve pointed out flexitime helps this by allowing employees to be somewhere else when there isn’t the demand. Most employees when they feel they are being looked after will give a lot in return.

Have a look at this great post by Adrian Dayton that highlights the generational difficulties in adapting from the old way to the flexible way.

Will it happen in Legal? I recall when I first started in a law firm, the working week for support staff was 37.5 hours, thanks to competition in the London firms support staff (secretaries at the time) this was reduced to 35 hours to keep the good people. If more city firms look at flexitime then it could ripple through the top 200 fairly quickly!

I caught this article from the Times today about regional law firms (“Regional law firms take severe steps to cut costs”). The main angle of the article is nothing new to those in the legal world, another round of cost-cutting measures, shorter working weeks, sabbaticals, secondments, salary freezes etc. It focussed on regional firms or probably more specifically the mid sized UK firms (as someone pointed out in the comments Pinsents aren’t what you would call a non-London/regional firm).

I looked at this in context of an article I posted a link to on twitter yesterday “Overworked corporate counsel cut back on use of outside firms”.

Then thought to myself: Is there going to be enough legal work to go around?

I mean if the work has dried up to such an extent, are firms wise gambling that levels of work will pick up to pre 2008 levels?

What if the corporate counsel continues with the primary firms and never goes back to using larger numbers of firms? What if the general drive to keep costs low in business continues and puts pressure on law firms? And then it is highly likely we will have a change in government in the UK , one that will maybe reverse the current situation where the solution to all problems is more laws and legislation being introduced, easing the red tape on business.

The question then becomes: Will we simply have too many law firms for the work out there?

I’m guessing therefore that we will start to see a fair bit of consolidation in the legal industry in the coming years.

A series of mergers outside the top 20? Perhaps it wouldn’t interest the magic circle but maybe others in the Top 20 will refocus back on the UK and absorb some of the mid range players? I just can’t see there being the number of firms there are now around the £150m revenue mark and so I’m guessing 2010 will be a bumper year for mergers leading to a whole range on new brands in “The Lawyer UK 200 – 2010”.

I predicted Clarke and Haddin would go early on Monday this week and England would wrap up the Lord’s test early afternoon, will this be another case of a great prediction or will it be a Tony Meehan (Decca) moment? Time will tell.

I read my copy of Computing magazine today and the comment section caught my eye. It was an article entitled “Focus Resources on what really matters” by Martin Butler, the basic premise is that IT has become caught up in a drive for efficiency at the expense of business success. In the current “economic climate” there is of course a natural tendency for cutting costs, corporate IT departments are usually large cost centres and thus are prime targets for cost savings. 

It reminded me though of an article I read some years ago about the shift of IT to a utility function akin to the railways or electricity companies (IT Doesn’t Matter by Nicholas G. Carr published in the Harvard Business Review). The premise being that these businesses “open opportunities for forward-looking companies to gain strong competitive advantages. But as their availability increases and their cost decreases – as they become ubiquitous – they become commodity input”.

These are opposite views of IT, one as a continuing driver for business growth and one as a driver for business efficiency and cost savings.

Now, I’ve started reading Richard Susskind’s “The End of Lawyers?” and I’m currently at the point where he talks about “technology lag”. This is the lag between two forms of technology: data processing and knowledge processing. The former (data processing) he puts as the “use of technology to capture, distribute, reproduce and disseminate information.”, the later (knowledge processing) a “set of technologies that help us analyse, sift through and sort out the mountains of data that we have created and helps make them more manageable.”

Richard Susskind points out that we are between these two forms of technology, in law firms I agree. And I think Martin Butler’s view of the IT function is the one that will facilitate this move and be able to supply the “Knowledge Processing” in law firms. I’m afraid that Nicolas Carr’s IT function will give us very efficient and cost effective departments that are stuck in “Data Processing”! It’ll be interesting as we climb out of the recession which law firm IT departments become.