No option for Law Firm

I’ve been running Microsoft’s Office 2010 on my home PC for about a month now and have to say I’m impressed. Well as impressed as you can be with an email client, a word processor and a spreadsheet application!

I thought I’d share in a few blog posts some of the really nice features of Outlook 2010 that I think will be useful for lawyers. For the first post I want to take a look at a couple of nice ways in which Outlook 2010 helps you organise and find email.

The conversation thread

This arrangement of the Inbox quickly tidies up all those email conversations. It allows you to maintain a date organised view of your emails, but then it groups a conversation into one line (see in the image below how the single email for Today is in fact a rolled up conversation).

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The conversation can then be expanded. The great thing about this is that it spans emails in other folders and even in other Outlook data files (e.g. a PST/archive file, which it does with my Archive Folders PST in the example below)

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You can then quickly tidy up your email by a right click on the conversation and selecting “Clean up conversation”. This will then remove superfluous messages from the conversation.

Search

The search in Outlook 2010 is much nicer than previously (for information, my previously is Outlook 2003).

When you start typing in your search you quickly get a drop down to allow you to limit the search to a person (from) or subject if required.

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The results are then highlighted both in the subject and in the body of the email.

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There is also a quick link at the bottom of the results to allow you to quickly expand the search scope from the folder you are in to all mail.

Finally on search, as with the rest of Outlook 2010, the ribbon is now here. After initial confusion as to where everything has gone, the ribbon becomes an asset. For example once you’ve done a search the ribbon switches to the search ribbon and provides useful options to you to use without having to go hunting through menus.

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There are a couple of reservations I have regarding search in Outlook 2010 searching though:

1. Performance – the indexing of all the email data. I’m not noticing any performance impact on my PC (a fairly old Pentium 4 machine), but my exchange mailbox at home is only 60Mb and the PST file attached is only 560Mb. When you’ve got a lawyer with three or four 2Gb PSTs you could be testing your PC’s!
2. If you’re planning to run on Windows XP – you will need to install the latest desktop search software from Microsoft, Outlook 2010 uses this for it’s search rather than an in built search. If you’re moving to Windows 7 this isn’t an issue.

Further thoughts

Whilst using these two pieces of functionality in Outlook 2010, one thing struck me.

How will this work with Document and Email management systems?

In the conversation threads how would this integrate with emails filed in the document management system (DMS)? Similarly with the search, integration to expand the scope of your search to include not just other mail in your inbox but emails in the DMS would be nice.

Microsoft has gone to some great lengths to really think about how you use email and streamline things to make everything just where you want it. There is a challenge for Legal IT providers to integrate into Outlook 2010 in a way that complements this.

I spent the day today in London at an event hosted by Trinity Expert Systems. The event focussed on Microsoft’s 2010 stack of products and my reason for attending was to look at Office 2010 and the surrounding technologies (I was particular keen to see what SharePoint 2010 had to offer).

I thought I would blog about a number of other products that caught my eye, not all of them were new, I’d seen some before, but it was the possibilities that came to mind that interested me.

The first session was more on the “infrastructure” products. I use quotes as these were what they traditionally were, but as you’ll see from these two parts of Microsoft’s System Centre, the end user service is becoming more of a focus:

• SCOM (Microsoft’s monitoring solution). The pictorial view of a systems health from a business service perspective and the possibilities to monitor client machines interested me, it took it beyond what I’ve seen in MOM (it’s predecessor). The possibilities of monitoring the iManage Document Management service end to end, for example. Not just that the physical server is up and running, but that the clients can connect, the IDOL indexer is indexing correctly, the SQL database and application servers are handling transactions nicely, applications load in a satisfactory time etc. For a support team you can see the health of the service as a whole rather than just the servers in it.
• Service Manager. A new introduction and effectively a help desk system. What I liked here was the self service portal idea, allowing the end user to “do it themselves”. So for example, install an authorised piece of software just by selecting if from the self service portal.

A couple of interesting features of Windows 7 were mentioned that I wasn’t aware of:

• AppLocker – in my opinion this allows you to lock down desktops in a much better way. Effectively giving a white list of apps you allow on your desktops, the users can install authorised apps themselves. No longer having to manage the crude Windows XP standard user v admin user, which inevitably leads to people having admin right and a proliferation of unwanted apps in the organisation. It also allows quick but controlled authorisation of new apps.
• BranchCache – basically this is local caching of information. So files from remote locations are downloaded once by the first person and then subsequent requests for the file are from local PC’s rather than from the remote location. I don’t know too many of the technical details but it looks interesting.

Next up was unified communications, I use Office Communicator at work and blogged at the start of the year that I think this is the year for IM in legal. But the integration into Outlook 2010 will need some thinking about. For example, do you need a separate application for communicator? It isn’t necessarily required as it gets integrated into Outlook 2010.

Also something that struck me was whether there was a need for a separate “Person” database (usually found in all firms intranets) diminishes as contact information becomes richer and exposed in many of the 2010 applications (Office, communicator, SharePoint etc)

After lunch it was the turn of SharePoint 2010, this product interests me at the moment. Especially the possibilities for real time collaboration when integrated with Office 2010. The granular way that collaboration works sounds very good, the locking of a paragraph as one party edits it removes the chaos that you got in say Google Wave. Combine this with Office Communicator and real remote collaboration becomes much easier.

I think there is a lot of potential here for Document Management System (DMS) providers to leverage this functionality. Law firms aren’t going to abandon hard core DMS systems anytime soon, but I think there will be use of SharePoint with Office 2010. So there is the real need to control the checkout from a DMS and smoothly transition to SharePoint for collaboration before finally returning that document back into the DMS with version control and audit history (the later isn’t kept by SP2010 when collaborating).

As I start to look at Office 2010 I see more and more possibilities. It’s going to be very hard to scope the delivery of this version of office as it seems to integrate so well with the other Microsoft applications!

Finally at the end of the day we got a quick run through security and Direct Access. This allows seamless access into the business network from your firms laptop wherever internet access can be gained. No more convoluted token/password access! It also ensures that the laptop is covered by all your corporate policies, deployments etc whenever the laptop is connected.

So overall a good day. Plenty learnt about the new technologies from Microsoft. But now, from my point of view, we just have to work out how we avoid getting too carried away with the possibilities for Office 2010!

On Thursday myself and a couple of colleagues attended a breakfast briefing from BigHand at Gordons law firm in Leeds, accompanied by plenty of bacon butties from the Roast! It was one of a number of briefings that they are doing throughout the UK on the back of their recent acquisition of nFlow.

As well realising that it’s not just Herbies that have hot meeting rooms, there was information on the nFlow acquisition. But for the most part we were shown demos of some of the new features being planned for future versions of the BigHand software (I think most were for v3.4). Below are some of the key functions that stood out for me (I was making notes on my touch screen Windows Phone whilst trying to keep up with the demos, so if you’re interested in a specific feature I’d double check my understanding with BigHand!)

• MS Office Integration. This allows a document to be attached to the dictation and passed through the workflow. Also there is the the ability to create and manage profile information to go with the dictation. These combined allow the Fee Earner to provide information to the secretary on the dictation that the system can then use to, for example, launch a template and fill in details such as document name straight from the dictation in the queue.
• Then combine this with the SDK and you could enable integration into the DMS (Document Management System) to transmit the document in the dictation workflow, yet maintain the security and version control of the DMS.
• Escalation function. The ability to set global rules in the system to escalate work. So for example a folder could be given a rule that after a certain time all outstanding dictations are moved to another folder (e.g. out of hours team or the team in the firms Asian offices for example).
• Reporting has been bolstered by the addition of an analytics module. This stores more information than before in the database (no longer limited to last 30 days) and has improved reporting (no longer using Excel). The module allows you to drill down on results obtaining more detail.
• In the mobility clients for BlackBerry and iPhone you now have the ability to attach documents and photos to dictations. Taking the devices further into general workflow than just pure dictation (e.g. you could dictate meeting notes that referred to notes on a whiteboard that you’d photographed on the phones camera)
• Finally the speech recognition module. This was brought in with v3.3 but it’s worth a mention again as it still impresses me. It’s way beyond the old desktop versions, but the addition in the newer version is the ability to chose to either send the transcribed document back to yourself for proofing or send it onto your default workflow for proofing. So the “training” can be done by a secretary checking and correcting your document.

The briefings are still being run, details can be found on their site.

Such a dull title, but that was the title of one of my final year modules at University. The textbook is probably in the loft somewhere. It was all about designing applications to be intuitive and easy to use (a much harder job when everything was DOS based!).

A couple of things over the last week got me thinking again about the design of applications from a user perspective and how important this is.

First off was the launch of Windows Phone 7 Series.

Clearly Microsoft finally “got it” with this release. They went back to the drawing board and designed something from a users perspective. Grouping things together in a logical human way (rather than technical grouping). Take a look at the video over at MSDN.

Second though was the interface with the most potential, Microsoft Live Labs Pivot.

Basically it is an interface into huge amounts of information. It allows you to slice up information in different ways, allowing you to go from huge amounts of data down to small amounts and back out in logical and connected ways.

It’s quite difficult to explain how this works using text, so take a look at the video over at the Microsoft Pivot site – http://getpivot.com/

In a law firm the possibilities for this are huge.

Law firms have huge amounts of data in documents and emails that this kind of interface would be perfect for. Imagine this being the main interface for Outlook or your document management system. You could slice up your emails quickly to find the information you were after. Or slice up your documents to collect together specific types of agreements, in specific jurisdictions etc.

On the developer page there are a number of challenges. One of which is a front end to SharePoint. I’m going to put my own challenge out there for any legal software developer to front end Autonomy iManage’s WorkSite, imagine this being the user interface of DeskSite!

Cloud computing. The latest buzz word in IT, one that is probably only knocked off the top in a Legal IT game of “buzzword bingo” by eDiscovery! I started writing this blog post a few months back, at a time when I’d been flash mobbed by “cloud computing” companies. The intention was to put down some of the things I’d seen that may be interesting  for Legal IT people, together with some of my thoughts on “cloud computing”.

So what exactly is “Cloud Computing”? According to Wikipedia:

“Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.”

That help?

Probably not, let me try. It’s basically the infrastructure (all the hardware currently located in many firms computer rooms or data centres) and rather than being in your firm it is hosted somewhere else by someone else. The location you don’t care about (in a technical sense). It’s out there somewhere and it’s always big enough for you to add all your new applications and data to.

Basically so that the worry of keeping enough space to hold all your data or enough power to run your applications is taken care of by someone else (subject to you paying them more money for more space/power of course!). And all the disaster recovery and business continuity work is taken care of.

So some of the things I’d seen that may be interesting  for Legal IT people?

One of the first to catch my eye back in the summer was Legal Cloud, I  was obviously interested in their "Legal" angle. And I subsequently ended up on a call with the CEO of Legal Cloud, Mark Hadfield. You can read on their site what they offer, but for me as an IT applications focussed person I picked up on the possible benefits for testing software. When you’ve the masses of data a lot of law firms now have it becomes difficult to test new upgrades in a way that is close to your live environment, after all finding spare storage for a few terabytes isn’t easy! Legal Cloud though can offer a “temporary use” option, i.e. you can use a few terabytes in the “cloud” which you could utilise to test say an upgrade of your DMS (Document Management System) along with the millions of documents.

Autonomy iManage’s Digital Safe product also got my attention. Allowing a consolidated archive of the vast amounts of email and documents within a law firm. This also integrates with their WorkSite DMS (which is the DMS of an awful lot of law firms) and also the IDOL engine for retrieval.

Finally I caught a few news stories about Microsoft Azure and their offerings for data, SQL server database and .NET services running in a "cloud". I was especially interested in their Web Platform Installer which to me seems a great platform to run all kinds of applications on the “Azure cloud”. As someone posted on twitter, for the home PC market this platform could do for Microsoft what the App Store has done for Apple’s iPhone platform.

As well as tangible products like these there is unfortunately an awful lot of hype surrounding cloud computing. But much as the media likes to advertise the wonders to consumers and remind us of how it will be a multi billion dollar industry in n years, at the end of the day for the most part the end user won’t notice any difference. After all if their data is sat in your computer room in the Rotherham or sat in a giant data centre "somewhere" what do they care (so long as it’s safe)?

My thoughts on cloud computing then?

First let me link you to a post on a blog I follow “3 Geeks and a Law Blog”, this post by Greg Lambert was on the possible IT reservations with the Cloud.

“The ‘Devil’ on my right shoulder starts to put two and two together and wonder if my IT/KM friends are also seeing this effect of the "cloud" and playing on the basic fears that the law firm leadership has about putting any information or resources outside the physical reaches of the firm?? Meanwhile the "Angel" on my left shoulder shouts that I’d better listen to my IT/KM folks and not be such a ‘greedy bastard’ (he’s a little foul mouthed angel) in trying to save money while exposing my firm and its information to all kinds of access, security and ethical risks.

I’m probably being over simplistic in my example, but this type of argument is probably going on right now. Cost versus Security… Cost versus Access… Cost versus Risk…. Over time, it seems that the cloud based infrastructure is going to close these holes and create a much harder argument for technology departments to win.”

Generally I have never worried about this. I am of a generation that completely understands that not only do you not have a job for life, but the industry you’re in may not last your lifetime! The IT industry certainly is not unused to outsourcing parts of if not all of its functions, so I’m not sure my “coolness” on cloud computing is through fear of my job.

The big issue I see right now though is a point Greg also raises:

“we will need high-level contract negotiators to craft the contracts between the firm and the companies providing the services”

This may prove easier for US Law Firms where the data can be hosted in US data centres. But for the global firms that cross multi jurisdictions there will be a whole raft of contracts to ensure clients know where there data is.

On the whole though I just can’t get excited by the whole cloud computing concept. For the end user it’ll be nothing different, just that your data and systems might not be sat in your computer room in the Slough office but in a giant data centre "somewhere". And maybe that’s how we need to see it. A potentially very useful piece of technology, but certainly not a silver bullet technology that is going to save billions, save the planet and sort out every one of our technology problems!

Addition: you may also want to take a read at this blog post I caught today, it has some good explanations of the different models and delivery methods of cloud computing.