No option for Law Firm

The following was one of my 2012 predictions.

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.

So Windows Phone as lead candidate to replace BlackBerry as the corporate smartphone of choice, am I mad?

Well no, I honestly think the new OS from Microsoft will make significant roads this year and shock the other two a little. Below are some of the reasons I think that it will position itself to be the enterprise device of choice:

• Nokia – yes they may have fallen behind a little in recent years, but people still talk about them and they know how to build a phone. Regardless of the OS the new Lumia 800 is a extremely well built piece of kit! Plus they can market phones in a way that is second only to Apple.
• Skype – sure this is available as an app for Android and the iPhone, but over the next year I expect to see closer integration with Windows Phone and more importantly closer integration with Lync. This will start to glue corporate telephony into Windows Phone and as Lync becomes the internal telephony platform of choice, Windows Phone becomes the natural choice for a law firms Unified Communications plan.
• The enterprise marketplace – rumoured to be coming in the Apollo release of Windows Phone (due later in 2012) is the ability to create a private, secure private app marketplace. Allowing controlled distribution of applications to corporate devices or access to corporate applications to specific personal devices.
• An obvious one, it’s Microsoft! And so is your corporate email (Exchange), your corporate intranet (SharePoint), your corporate engine room in legal (Office) and your corporate messaging/telephony (Lync). Do you not think they will all just work together seamlessly? Try using Windows Phone now with OneNote, SkyDrive and OneNote in Office 2010 to see how well this can work.
• The original xbox case study – when the xbox was first released all the “gaming experts” said it was too late to the party and stood no chance against Sony and Nintendos offerings (PS2 and Gamecube). Ten years later and the xbox is THE games console and dominates the market. Sure Sony and Nintendo are still there with a healthy market share, but the 360 is the market leader. History has a tendency to repeat itself, what I saw in the original xbox I see now in Windows Phone.

And finally a bit of wild speculation?

• RIM will adopt the Windows Phone OS! Sound ridiculous? Well maybe but it has been suggested by at least one analyst and given that BBX seems to be a long way off still, a more “Nokia like” radical approach may be required to stop the rot at RIM.

Overall I don’t think Windows Phone will overtake Android or iPhone in market share in 2012, but I think by the end of the year it will be looking like a definite player in the market. And in the corporate world the knowledge and foothold that Microsoft has will give it prime position to take the crown from RIM.

Blackberry running Windows Phone OS?

So Microsoft have pulled out of the Legal vertical (stories here and here). It has caused quite a buzz on twitter amongst us Legal IT folk.

The question is why. I think the comment on the knowlist article sums up the two opposite conclusions: 

The glass half full position is that this is a temporary, cost cutting reorganisation exercise. The glass half empty position: Legal – too fussy, too complicated, too small, not enough dollar. 

There’s probably truth in both. Why are Microsoft in business? To sell products! Their professional services team are effectively there to help them do that.

But what is there to sell to Legal? We all use Microsoft Office in a big way and aren’t going to shift anytime soon. We’re tied into Windows as most Legal IT vendors only provide their software for that platform. And because of our dependence on the above our licencing for the most part allows us access to SharePoint (at the very least SharePoint foundation). So again, what’s there left to sell us that is specific to Legal? Email and Unified Communications is going to be pretty much the same in every organisation. So that leaves CRM, not a product to base a whole team on. Thus they can save money by closing the team.

I jokingly commented on twitter that maybe we should expect to see Clifford Chance announce a deal with one of the big DMS vendors soon, indicating that maybe this was down to not being able to get the SharePoint DMS to work for legal. I’m not sure that this is the case, but they may have seen the market fill with Legal specific providers building on top of SharePoint (Workshare, Sword, Epona to name three) and from this Microsoft can sell their product (SharePoint) and let others do the implementation work (the hard work!).

I spoke a while ago to a senior person in a well known supplier to Legal (no not the one beginning with A) who indicated that internally they were more focussed outside Legal now because there was more money in it. So if old Legal IT vendors are looking elsewhere for the money it stands to reason that Microsoft have probably drawn the same conclusions.

So is it a loss for Legal? I don’t think so, Microsoft products will still be used and there are plenty of professional services outfits that can help. I suspect this is a cold hard look at our vertical by Microsoft and a realisation that we’re going the way they want us to go without the need of a nudge. So why spend money on the team to help us along.

You can’t have failed to hear the big news today, Microsoft’s $8.5bn purchase of Skype. I’ve read a fair few tweets this afternoon about how it’s a bad deal. That they’re playing catch-up with Google and Apple, they paid over the odds etc

But I think it’s a great deal for Microsoft and also for lawyers.

We all know Skype is huge in the consumer market, in Europe I’d say Google nor Apple have anything like the consumer share that Skype has. Microsoft today suddenly became the market leader in the consumer market place.

But that’s not why I think it’s great deal.

In legal I know of plenty of lawyers who also use it for business. Keeping in touch with clients and colleagues on international deals is made an awful lot cheaper when using Skype rather than traditional land lines. 

The key here is how Microsoft leverage the consumer dominance and usage in business into model that makes money. For that look to Lync. All of a sudden Microsoft have the ability to break the proprietary nature of Skype and enable the ability to federate all those customers into corporate Lync environments. Lawyers will be able to use Lync and all the benefits of a unified communications platform within their firms, but now also communicate to their clients who are using Skype. When a firm is evaluating which platform to go for and their clients all use Skype anyway, there is a compelling argument to go with the corporate platform that will work with Skype.

Then there is the Windows Phone 7 platform. Late to the party but a great OS that is getting better. The combination of the “Mango” release, the deal with Nokia and now Skype will give this platform a huge boost for both consumer and business. The integration that’s there already with Sharepoint, Office and  Exchange together with Skype linked to your corporate unified communications platform (instant messaging, voicemail, phone etc) could make Windows Phone 7 devices a good option for a corporate device.

As I said at the start of the year, IM and unified communications platforms are a big thing for legal. Great for bringing cross border teams together, great for keeping in touch with clients and great for bringing costs down. I think the Skype deal may put Lync in the corporate driving seat.

Their actual names are QR Codes, like the one to the left. They seem to be cropping up all over the place, including lawyers business cards.

I’m not sure about the benefits other than being a gimmick to attract attention. I posted as much this week on twitter and this led to a brief twitter conversation with @jeffrey_brandt, @emmalouwillcox, @KMHobbie and @geekchicy on the merits of QR Codes.

Some of the comments raised were:

• scan code smartphone, no typing – big advantage! Great for location based stuff (Maps)
• why should you need an app for it?!
• QR code on google.gl service link page, e.g. http://goo.gl/info/7nKy1#week
• I see biggest potential value of linking static hard copy to dynamic web content

I was also reminded of Microsoft’s attempt at its own version (as somebody pointed out “came up w/their own version of QR code. Quite silly!”), this then reminded me I did a blog post about Microsoft’s “Tag” just over a couple of years ago!

“Microsoft Tag – perfect for the paper file?”

I re-read my article and can’t help think now that a simple barcode would be as useful and so my thoughts come back to my original point made on twitter:

Are QR codes just a fad? What are benefits over urls? Seems bit of a gimmick to use an app to snap QR to get a link? Am I missing something?

And I don’t seem to be the only one, Google seems to be thinking the same. But I am going to install a QR application on my Windows Phone 7 and give it a go for a while. I’ll post what I think in the comments, but let me hear your thoughts on QR codes too.

It’s been a few years since iManage WorkSite effectively won the war of the document management systems (DMS) against Hummingbird’s DM5. Since then both companies have been through a number of mergers and are currently the Legal DMS products are owned by Autonomy and Opentext respectively.

The peace though looks soon to be shattered by a counter strike on two fronts. On the one side we have the SharePoint juggernaut from Microsoft and on the other a coalition of vendors we’ll call “the cloud” (currently led from the front by netdocuments).

So who’s going to win this latest battle? First off it’s worth pointing out that the game has changed considerably since the WorkSite 8.0 v DM5 days, it’s no longer just traditional DMS functionality that is required in the armoury, but email management capabilities and great search functionality.

Let’s start with SharePoint. In its 2010 guise it looks like SharePoint is starting to be taken seriously. From Lewis Silkin’s SharePoint implementation to the announcement that Clifford Chance are going SharePoint there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the product is ready to be used by law firms. The big benefit of course is the cost, if you’re licenced for Microsoft, then you’re likely licensed for SharePoint. Plus there is the native integration with Office 2010. The addition of the FAST search engine gives it some capability against WorkSite’s IDOL engine. And there’s also a growing IT skillset out there to maintain the product (wider than just the Legal IT market).

But wait, there are limitations for Legal. Matter centricity and email management to name two. These can be addressed by “add ons” like Workshare Point or DMS4Legal (the former I have seen and have to say looks really neat) but then the cost and resource benefits are reduced or eliminated.

So if it’s not a one horse SharePoint race, what about the other side, the cloud coalition?

I’ll be honest I like the concept of netdocuments. The desktop application has all the features of a good DMS like WorkSite, but the heavy lifting of a DMS (the application servers, the indexers, the database etc) is managed in the cloud. Allowing the focus for the Legal IT department to be on the fee earners desktop, which is where it should be.

The downside of the cloud at the moment is the perceived security and risk concerns, I’m sure this will be resolved in time. But right now it’s still a stumbling block for many firms, but the shift may be coming (Foley & Lardner in the US, a 1000 lawyer firm, have possibly shown the way).

So is the original winner of the DMS battle doomed?

Short answer, certainly not.

I think there is plenty of life left in iManage WorkSite. As well as the fact that unlike the others it is a proven product in Legal, it also has a couple of aces up it’s sleeve.

First off it’s proven itself to be scalable to meet the demands of even the largest law firms. Something that SharePoint I don’t think has yet proven. The number of documents a law firm has may have levelled, but the email volumes on matters is still growing. That’s a counter strike on one flank.

On the other side it’s announced a big offensive by moving WorkSite to a hosted solution, too early to tell whether this is a route to victory (or what exactly the hosted solution will look like), but on the face of it moving WorkSite into the cloud itself is a good move.

So who’ll be the winner?

I honestly don’t know. Thinking about it, I hope there won’t be one outright winner. A little competition in the Legal DMS arena is a good thing. Product competition usual brings with it innovation and advancement, it forces vendors to up their game. All of which can only be a good thing for the lawyers!!  *

*that’s lawyers as users of the technology, not in some big litigation of course!!