All posts by Jason

charles christian rip

It came as a huge shock this morning reading the news of the death of Charles Christian. For me it felt that the sad news warranted a little more than just a short twitter post to pay tribute to the man who became as synonymous to the UK Legal Tech scene as anyone (Richard Susskind included).

I came across Charles back in 1996 when I started in the legal industry, well more specifically I came across the Orange Rag. Sat in an old office in the centre of Bradford waiting for in reception for my interview I picked up this strange “magazine” printed on bright orange paper and was introduced to the strange and wonderful world of legal technology.

I was lucky enough to meet Charles on a number of occasions through the years, whether as an attendee at various supplier conferences or at events that he helped run. It was through his involvement in LawTech Futures in the early 2010’s that he encouraged me to get involved and to talk at the event at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre, from there I have enjoyed a number of speaking gigs in London and across Europe.

Along with a few other legal tech stalwarts, Charles was involved in the early days of twitter and was a fountain of knowledge on legal tech. So, if you needed a bit of tech history or information about conferences, he was a font of knowledge and was always willing to engage in conversation.

I am sure there are many who have a huge sense of loss today, mine will likely be just a fraction of theirs, but to me it shows how much he touched and influenced so many people. After all he and the Orange Rag are one of the reasons this blog was started.

You will be missed Charles. RIP.

Other lovely tributes I’ve read: here and here

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Is Dictation Still A Thing?

Let’s not even start on whether speech recognition in dictation has taken off yet!

With the proliferation of Alexa and Google devices in the home and voice assistants on your phone and in a lot of car entertainment systems it seems the idea of voice as an input method may not be dead, I’m not sure we’ll see a return to the Olympus device on every desk but…..

One article that caught my eye as a useful tip for those with Apple watches was this, Your Apple Watch Is Great for Taking Quick Voice Memos. The idea of taking down some notes or recording a conversation (with permission!) straight from the device strapped to your wrist and then having the results sync’d to your other (Apple) devices seems a great idea.

And while we’re on the topic, going back to the first point. Does anyone use the native dictation functionality within Microsoft Word to dictate their documents at all? If so let us know how it works for you in the comments!

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The Metaverse – Is it simply the latest conference topic or are we at the start of the next big thing?

For those old enough to remember the 1990’s you may remember bold predictions like this

proving it is very hard to predict the future, if you gamble correctly on the big ticket things you’ve an opportunity of a career as a futurologist, but you’ve as much chance of being a quotable example of a luddite forever!

This was a topic of a twitter conversation the other week after a post during ILTACON22

So here goes, in print my thoughts. I think we are possibly on the cusp of the next wave of an interface into a virtual world, I also think we’re at the Netscape Navigator 1.0 stage of the journey and will have a few bumps along the way before a) the technology improves and b) the majority start to get it and embrace it. I’m not sure the “Amazon” of this new world has emerged yet, but if anyone has any share tips on that one this time round let me know in the comments 🙂

There are a few early adopters and firms looking to try things out and kudos too them, as collectively I’m sure we’ll all learn a lot about what works and doesn’t. Examples:

Artificial Law – law firms in the metaverse

German law firm opens office in the metaverse

Major law firm buys property in the metaverse and opens virtual office

Some will go for the AOL model (facebook metaverse), others will go their own way. But I’m quite fascinated by the metaverse, it’s early day but I think there is something in this one!

You may ask, what are my credentials as a futurologist? Well I did spot the potential of Amazon shortly after launch in the UK in October 1998, with my first order in November

Then I did have a web2.0 idea before web2,.0 became a thing, I just was too limited as a developer to realise the idea, the only language I knew at the time was ASP (see book order above!). My idea was essentially a Foursquare/TripAdvisor type platform for nights out. I even registered a domain name at the time:

So on this one as the saying goes “trust me I’m a Doctor”😉

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Is this time slot suitable? No. How about this one?

Everyone has played this email tennis game right? The endless meeting invites, tentative or decline replies, repeat.

The title of an article I read recently sums it up nicely ” Scheduling meetings burns productivity”! (the article is linked further down this post)

There are plenty of tools to help with this, some like Outlook’s scheduling assistant have been around for ages (though it amazes me how many people still don’t use this or maybe choose not to!)

This post though is to highlight a couple of tools that may be useful in this area.

The first I came across in this post the other day that has a slightly different approach to scheduling time, the product it talks about is called GoodTime. The article here, is an interview with its co-founder. But if you want to know more about the product, go to their website goodtime.io

Essentially it looks at scheduling in multiple different ways, but using one interface. It integrates with the main calendaring platforms and video conferencing platforms.

The second is useful if you’re a Microsoft 365 house, as there are some tools within that platform that can help, though I find they’re maybe not as neatly joined together (yet). So meet now in Teams or see availability through Outlook for example. But one you might not have come across is FindTime, this is an Outlook add-in (modern) and it essentially shortcuts the “tennis” by bundling options into one poll.

On receipt if you click on the options you get taken to a Microsoft webpage to enable you to pick your options.

The organiser then receives a notification email that shows a collated view of all the responses, where they can see which is the best slot and schedule the meeting with one click. They also have access to a FindTime dashboard where they can see all the “polls” in one place too.

There’s a good article here that shows the whole process.

Now a request, I am sure in the past I have seen something like FindTime being available as a portal, so a web page you can go to to schedule a meeting with someone and it gave a view of the slots available for that person based on their calendar. I was sure it was part of the 365 ecosystem. If you know what this might be please let me know in the comments, as I couldn’t find anything through Google.

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Are We Off Back To The 90’s For A New Battle In The Lawyer Salary War?

In the past I’ve occasionally skipped a tech focussed post and looked at some general legal market posts. This is one of those posts.

A couple of stories caught my eye this last couple of weeks, an email from The Lawyer’s Horizon mailing and some data from Thomson Reuters market insight report, both related to lateral hiring and lawyer salaries.

The first was an article on Cripps, a Tunbridge Wells based law firm. It is countering larger (higher paying) city firms poaching all their lawyers by adjusting it’s leverage, as The Lawyer article puts it:

has essentially decided that hiring more junior lawyers to plug the holes left behind isn’t worth the faff. Instead, it’s now picking off paralegals from larger firms

It’s an interesting model, one similar to the Insurance practices of large firms when I started in the legal industry in the late 90’s. That led to a real commoditisation of the insurance sector, the jettisoning of said practice groups from many firms to insurance specialist juggernauts of now.

The Thomson Reuters report was on the “flight risk” of staff in law firms (legal staff) and the role most at risk, Associates. Up from an 11% likelihood in 2018-22 to a 45% risk in 2020-22. Backing up the thinking of Cripps I guess. Interestingly the report highlights that these were likely conservative numbers and the flight risk was higher than reported numbers as more than one-third of laterals changed firms even when they were not considering a move.

It may all be a moot point as reports are starting that the job market is cooling, but I have always wondered if a significant recession hit again what would be the big moves from firms, last time it was a move to lower cost bases for back office work (eg moves from London north to Manchester) or service centres in lower cost places (eg moves to Belfast, Warsaw etc). Possibly the new trends have started, but currently addressing other issues, like this to battle the current salary wars and also like technology innovation pushes in firms to both provide efficiency and new business opportunities?

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It’s been a while……and we still haven’t cracked hybrid meetings!

Well it’s been two years since my last post, I gone through lots of should I shouldn’t I continue hosting this blog? But I’ve come to realise it has helped me horizon scan the legal business and it’s technology use, something I’ve missed doing for a couple of years. So how best to restart?

Well why not start where I left off and continue on from the last post on remote working tools.

I have to say the post was pretty spot on, Teams really has become much more standard in business, we all quickly transitioned more or less back to normal routines, but it’s clear now that the pandemic is behind us that hybrid working is now fully embedded in the working day. No more 5 days a week in the office.

But has anyone else cracked those hybrid meetings, the ones where half the participants are in the office, half online? No me neither! It starts with the tech problems, everyone at home is on ready (we’ve all cracked the when to mute, when to camera etc) , but the meeting room goes through the obligatory ten minutes of struggling to connect the tech, echoing mics and squealing speakers, “can you hear me” etc. And then the room proceeds to dominate the meeting, have side chats and pretty much forget there are others on the call.

I’m not sure what the answer is yet, maybe you can add in the comments any tips you’ve got on improving the experience. But I did come across this BBC article from 2021 on various ideas companies have for this space and improving remote meetings. It will be interesting to see how the tech unfolds in this area.

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The battle of the video communication platforms – Is lock-down over yet?

I was going to write this post during the lock-down, when Zoom lived up to its name and took off in a big way. I had the idea of looking at Zoom vs Teams and why the former got such traction early on. But things changed week by week and much like the government guidance or the medias latest stick to bash them with, as soon as you think you have understood it things change again!

But during these past months I do seem to have used pretty much all the platforms rather than sticking to one specific one. Zoom, Teams, Skype for Business and Skype. And I can understand why Zoom became the to go to platform, it’s simplicity is its key. It’s stripped away all the complexity and focussed on the communications aspects, the video is done right – who’d have thought we wanted most to see everyone in the meeting not a constant slipping in and out of a big image of the speaker (or more likely see the person who is unmuted and crashing about) with a random 3 or 4 others in a small box or circle. Then add simple, but useful extra features like the ability to break out into small groups and top it off with an experience that most of the time just works and you’ve a winning formula.

There were some security concerns at the start, some valid and some I suspect stoked by competitors. But a number of updates seems to have addressed most of these (though I know some companies are still stopping use for reasons that have been patched weeks ago).

That was the original angle for the post, but Teams is now catching back up, by end of April they were talking about 3×3 video which was a welcome addition. By May breakout rooms were on the cards. Proving the benefit of the 365 platform, turning feature around quickly. So by the time we all get back to the offices there won’t be much feature wise to split Zoom and Teams for most firms.

I think though Zoom is here to stay and though. Teams will be a fixture for many, but I do think Microsoft missed a trick early on that could have removed the need for firms to also have Zoom. And it highlights that it really does need to sort out it’s mess of technologies and give a clear view of it’s platforms, let firms and consumers have a totally SaaS version of Teams without the need to configure a tenancy, that maybe is a stripped back version (but not separate!) to just communicate and have basic desktop sharing. Then bin Skype, both versions (look they ruined the consumer version, they had a killer cross platform solution, it was what Zoom was years ago but got ruined integrating in the Microsoft ID and all the other bloatware).

Simplicity of the Zoom offering will keep it in play, especially as it has got such a hold across the consumer space now (we’ve mentioned the Skype shambles, but Google and Facebook were late to this too and didn’t have their platforms ready to go). Personally during the lockdown Zoom has been the go to platform for pretty much every outside work situation my family has been in.

It’s hard to argue that home working has been a huge success, something that is now embedded and won’t shift backwards to the previous “normal”. But there are a couple of challenges left  that need further work:

First the big challenge we will face going back to our offices, online conference calls have worked very well because everyone is remote. They still leave a lot to be desired though when the majority of attendees are in a physical meeting room. The remote workers start to get side-lined in this scenario.

As I mentioned in a talk just before the lockdown at the BLTF 2020, this is the area we need to start to develop and get right. The technology used to share video, presentations and whiteboards will need to be in every office collaboration area or spaces will need to be designated for hybrid meeting use and in person only meetings. There are so many scenarios we will all be familiar with of being unable to connect visitors, having the wrong video connection etc We will need to solve these quickly as we are not going to get rid of home working now!

Second challenge is another I raised at that presentation. Voice quality. Thankfully in work situations we have developed the etiquette of using good quality microphones (usually headsets or quiet rooms and a good PC/Mac mic), muting yourself when not speaking and the host managing the meeting to keep the background noise down. Even with all the childcare challenges people have had this discipline has meant meetings have run extremely well. I can’t say the same for the outside meetings though, the difference is noticeable (“unmutees”, “camera fiddlers” and “upnosers”) and this will unfortunately be the same when we’re having the hybrid office & remote meetings.

One ray of hope though is work companies like nVidia have been doing to utilise spare capacity in their graphics cards to run AI technology to eliminate background noise. Could this be the audio equivalent of the background blur in video?? Watch the video on the BBC site, the results are pretty amazing! And it’s early days too so to see that companies are starting to see the challenge and doing work to develop this area is great news.

It’s clear that after this situation we are in is over things will be different. I hate the term “new normal” as I don’t things will be revolutionary different, we’ll quickly slip back to a recognisable normal (it’s already underway) but we will embrace remote working as it works (as a lot of us who were doing it previously knew anyway). So it’ll be more an acceleration of what was already happening. What we will need is the same acceleration in the tech at the office end when we start to go back in.

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BLTF2020 talk – part 4 : Legal Technology is it still relevant?

So let’s answer the question first, absolutely.

Hype over the last few years has been the issue. How many times have we heard artificial intelligence, big data or blockchain mentioned. Some of these have had a few case studies, but none have caused a revolution,

But taking a look at the legal tech start-ups now, is almost like being back in the late 1990’s and wandering the floor of ” The Solicitors’ & Legal Office Exhibition” when a whole host of new technology firms were starting to implement on that beige thing with a screen that was in the corner of a lawyers office at the time.

This image is just a small number of the start-ups in one area that you’ll be familiar with in legal.

Perhaps not all these will work, but the difference now from the hype cycle above is that these are targeting business problems.

And that is where we are seeing the big change, innovation as a synonym for “new shiny technology” has started to morph into finding problems, applying techniques like lean six sigma or design thinking and working out ways to solve business challenges. Sometimes this is business change internally, sometimes it is people creating a start-up to deliver a solution to a problem.

With so many new options available to law firms and many options to solve the same problem, how do you chose? Or more importantly how can you try out these solutions quickly? Fail fast if you will.

Well this goes back to part 3. If we’ve got a platform that presents all our data and key services outwards and provides standard interfaces to access these, then plumbing in these new tools to test functionality can be much easier than in the past where you might have the spiderweb of interconnections between systems needed.

I want to go back to AI though to finish. A technology that I have may have been cynical of meeting it’s initial hype.

But a recent listen to this Forrester podcast last month shows that AI as a tool is now being put in some great solutions. One quote jumped out:

“29% of developers are using AI and machine learning technologies to build application that are infused with AI”

Infused with AI. This to me is AI moving beyond hype, it’s no longer buying “AI” as a product, realising that It’s not a “thing” but think of it more like a database, it’s becoming a core piece of a solution that solves a problem.

But here’s some takeaway to think about.

So we build software and what we are doing is giving the software more capabilities using machine learning, so rather than defining our input and getting a defined output, we build in machine learning and allow the software itself to learn and define the output. So the same input could give different outputs.

And so here we have a challenge, how do we test AI solutions to ensure we can be confident of the results. It’s not the end of the world if your Alexa get’s things wrong, but a decision in a legal case?

There are a number of cases of AI bias causing unwanted results when the solutions were released in the wild. Two well known ones are Micorsoft’s “racist bot” Tai and the US Compas system used to do risk assessments during sentencing.

Testing will need to change, the results are not deterministic and so a test engineer would need to run a test many times and make sure that statistically the conclusion is correct. As more and more legal technology infuses AI it makes sense to start looking at the test frameworks that are starting to be creating for AI testing, especially functional testing to limit the risk in bias.

How we test AI will certainly be a topic that will need to become part of the law firm IT dept arsenal in coming years as more legal tech get infused with machine learning. But as you ponder this new world of AI testing I will leave you with one quote from a testers blog

“What happens when both testing applications and systems under test use AI?”

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BLTF2020 talk – part 3 : · The age of DMS, PMS, Telephone is over – long live the platform

We’re so used to using multi devices in our personal lives, and the ease of using this set up is largely due to the rise in the large platforms (others call these ecosystems, but we’re meaning the same thing). Whether that be the Google platform with Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Hangouts or Microsoft’s with Outlook, OneDrive, Word Online, Skype. If you’re solely an Apple device user there are equivalents from Apple, but the former don’t tie you into a specific device manufacturer.

These platforms brought the ability to hold your email and documents in one place, but then to have them accessible through any device, to be able to make calls and collaborate on the content easily no matter whether you were using your PC, Tablet or Phone.

The next stage for law firms therefore is to bring this ubiquitous access to services and data to the corporate devices and unlock the ease of use and the device and mobility requirements we’ve discussed in parts one and two.

The challenge though is we’ve a lot of legacy systems and historically implemented these systems for specific purposes, creating many islands of data and functionality.

Also many of these islands have very specific ways of access, only providing access via an installed application on a PC for example. If you’re lucky you may also have access to a mobile app with possibly some of the functionality.

But then overtime we’ve also complicated things by linking some of these systems together, usually in a very fixed inflexible proprietary way each time. So as an example the link or data exchange from the PMS to the DMS is a totally different format to that between the PMS and HR System.

Creating access to multiple devices has been through a vendor provided app on  the various devices, but something complex like creating a collaborative view of matter data taking financial information and document management data and allowing you to select key documents from the KM repository on a mobile device. Well forget it.

Well the future is within reach.

Let’s start with an obvious recognisable one. Microsoft’s 365 platform. Now this image is slightly out of date now as some services have been renamed and more have been added, but this is a great example of one of the benefits of cloud platforms, they are constantly bringing additional functionality online.

There is too much available to cover in this post but let’s pick out some areas which may be of use to a law firm:

Starting with all those consumer items mentioned above which are now all available in one corporate platform – All your Mail, Calendar, Contacts. Online access to documents through OneDrive and telephony through Teams.

Teams is though provides much more, like collaborating on information and documents, group communication, chat facilities and wikis. For those familiar with Slack it’s essential Microsoft’s answer to that.

Stream – this is essentially a corporate YouTube

Yammer – a corporate Facebook

With all these services on one platform you have out of the box services available on multiple devices, as well as a wealth of tools to build out additional services using tools like PowerApps and Power Automate. The obvious challenge for law firms is what about the DMS? But most of the major vendors in the legal space are aware of the 365 platform and are starting to ensure that access to documents is easy through it.

For most firms there won’t be one overarching platform that can delivery every service and solution a law firm needs, it also doesn’t necessarily give the flexibility to add a brand new service or product quickly from a different vendor or maybe a bespoke need.

But the platform concept still works, the key though for a lot of firms will be sorting out our data.

When I first started my career as a programmer for a utilities firm as a placement student, I worked on ICL mainframes developing in COBOL using an IDMS database. One of the features of this database was the in built data dictionary. This meant I had a clear picture of what all the data meant, how it was related, used and formatted. We lost some of this rigour in the clamour for the agility that SQL databases brought.

It seems obvious to have this organised data view, but how many of us have access to a fully defined data model for our firms, a cross system understanding of the data, that is mastered once in the enterprise and shared and managed across all the systems?

Now if we did have this and created a platform across all of this data that could transform, add value and present out the data to allow it to be consumed by services above easily, we’d have a platform that could facilitate building out new services or products quickly.

So imagine a scenario where we want to find all the profitable matters using data from the PMS, use this understanding on the data from the DMS and the communications to the client, and from this identify candidate templates or common clauses from the documents (KM) and develop a template plan (LPM) for future work in this sector. Then use data on clients to understand which this work could be marketed to.

There is potentially so much value in the data we hold. It’s not buzzword bingo any more, we’re not talking about “big data” but simply understanding the data in the various systems, ensuring it is tagged consistently, has consistent understanding of the meaning, mastered once but shared easily.

Providing an easy way to access all this information will allow us to start to explore some of the new legal tech quickly to see what works and what doesn’t.

Click here to read part 4

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