Tag Archives: susskind

Return to the Future part 1

A friend of mine commenting on their work situation last year used a phrase that chimed with me at little, they said referring to their job that they’d “lost their mojo”. For me it was a feeling that Legal IT had lost that something that it had, the reason I really liked working in this sector as opposed to say the utilities industry I’d started in, what was it? Was it the endless talk of AI, big data, blockchain…..how many years have we been talking about these now? Was the legal industry of the late 90’s just more exciting?

Well I knew a place to start looking, I’d revisit the classic “The Future of Law” by Richard Susskind (revised 1998 edition) a book that every IT person in the industry back then had on the bookshelf.

In this first post I’m going to look at ten of the “likely developments in IT over the next ten years” according to Mr Susskind in 1998.

  1. Global telecommunications – great start with the predictions here and a big tick, this was pretty much spot on. Richard predicted a global telecoms infrastructure that would “enable the instantaneous transmission of seemingly limitless amounts of digital information at negligible cost”. Given I’m typing this directly into the cloud whilst listening to music streamed from somewhere other than my PC, I’d say conclusive evidence.
  2. Information industries – basically this was the idea that we’d have systems that led us through complex issues on a question and answer basis, domestic examples he gave were online booking! So another tick then. I mean this can anyone imagine not conducting a transaction this way anymore?
  3. Virtual private networks – not VPN’s as we know now, but walled off restricted parts of the internet. The concept has been achieved with specific communities and sites, but perhaps not in the way thought at the time with walled off networks. So yes think this is a tick as the concept has come to fruition.
  4. Computing power – “holographic memory”, maybe not specifically but the promise of capacity way beyond DVD’s certainly achieved. Also “such that credit card sized machines more powerful than any PC of today with detachable, slim-line screens are entirely conceivable within the next ten years or so”, iPhone anyone?
  5. Convergence of computers and television – need I say anymore on this one!
  6. Smarter Technology – now I’m going to come back to this one in a later post, but let’s just pluck two words from the section “artificial intelligence” and think Hmmm.
  7. Multi-media – this section was on the move from print to digital. Another big tick, from Kindles to online newspapers and magazines, we’re definitely digital first nowadays.
  8. Usability – “continuous speech systems will be widely used within five years” so 2003. The concepts of voice, augmented reality and customised interfaces are mentioned. The latter has changed with the advent of the app and the touchscreen, but we’re still nowhere near in the others if we’re honest!
  9. Interpersonal and interorganisational computing – “groupware – a category of system and software specifically designed to encourage and enable collaborative, interpersonal and interorganisational activity”. So like Facebook, Microsoft Teams, Slack etc? Tick.
  10. The Web as the “first port of call” – “will become as commonplace as the telephone and the television”, well given it’s supplanted them both you can’t argue with that!

So pretty good to be fair, given the difficulty in predictions within IT it’s actually very good. Sets things up nicely for me to start to pick at some of the sections later in the book that look at some specific Legal IT areas, areas that I think Richard Susskind got right (similar to above) it’s just, well you’ll see!

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A follow up to ‘Big change in legal is a generation away!’

In the last post I wrote a piece about how change in legal was going to be a generation away. Going against the conference talks and legal press zeitgeist, I said that there was nothing I could see that was going to bring a revolution in law firms anytime soon.

Then a colleague asked “Don’t you think clients will force the change sooner?” Hmm, this got me thinking. Will the clients push a change in the market?

Well I’ve thought about this a little since and thought I’d use a Susskind story to show why I’m saying “No”.

Susskind uses the story about training inside power tool manufacturer Black & Decker to show how lawyers need to think of different delivery methods/processes. The B&D employees are shown a power drill and asked, “This is what we sell, isn’t it?” The staff reply, “Of course,” they are then shown a hole drilled in a wall. “No, this is what our customers want. Your job is to find ever more creative ways to give our customers what they want.”

Drill hole

It’s a great story, but not if you stop to think about it some more. I mean I still use a drill, just like my dad did and his dad before him. Why? Because it’s the best way of getting a hole! And I think that it the case in corporate law, the client is getting satisfactory holes. Sure they’d like it cheaper, but this is happening, costs are going down (see last post).

But to back up my previous post. I suspect, like when I’m shopping for a drill, there is a point where a price gets so low it starts alarm bells ringing. “Is this cheap thing going to last?”, “I’d be better getting the Bosch wouldn’t I, not sure that cheap store brand will drill through what I want”. At this point the client will start to accept the costs.

So I’ve considered the client and still think as my last post, big change in legal is a generation away!

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Does IT matter in law firms?

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.

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