General IT, General Legal IT

Everything is fine in social media, the sky is blue!

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I signed up to Twitter back in 2007 I think, can’t remember the exact date as my original account got wiped in some X cull or other. My current account started in 2009 and I’ve been a fairly regular user since. That is until August 17th 2023 when I made my last post on X.

My stopping didn’t have anything to do with anything other that Tweetdeck going behind the paywall, a paywall that for me was too high for a social media platform. I tried Threads but my experience with it wasn’t great, as you can read in a previous post. In the end I got fed up of waiting for that v1.1 to fix things! So that was it for a Twitter like experience….or it was until I got an invite to BlueSky!

BlueSky social media platform

What a breath of fresh air, it’s like taking a step back in time to the early days of Twitter when developers were encouraged and there was a wide variety of topics and conversation not just town crier politics. In fact in reality BlueSky is more an open protocol for a social media platform, the BlueSky app is billed as an example, the push is for others to build things using the protocol. Bit like the early days of email, there was a mail protocol but others built Outlook, Thunderbird etc

So is it just like early Twitter? Not exactly, here are some key things to understand that I think will help you get started.

The home or following feed is pretty much as you’d expect, these are posts from people you follow. In the settings you can choose whether this includes replies or not, reposts etc But key difference is that there are no algorithms pushing content, it’s simply what you follow.

The concept of feeds though is slightly different to Twitter lists. Custom feeds can be created by developers to collate content, so for example I’ve created a Legal Tech feed to look for key legal tech terms (subscribe here). I’ve not done any coding for years, so I took advantage of SkyFeed created by the developer community to help you create custom feeds, all you need to understand is a bit of regex which isn’t too hard to pick up.

But there are now lots of feeds to follow and in fact although I’ve done the usual follow/follow back to build up a community, it’s mostly through feeds that I find the most useful posts and conversations.

So what about Tweetdeck? Well thanks to an active developer community there’s a web app called Deck Blue which is absolutely fantastic, it’s pretty much tweetdeck but is getting developed all the time and is the one thing that’s kept me with BlueSky. It really is that good!

On mobile, again there is a BlueSky app but the developer community has built something better, GraySky is a fantastic mobile app and as good as any 3rd party twitter app that there used to be (before they were all killed off).

I joined BlueSky on August the 7th, have made 280+ posts and in my busiest month posted 106 times. I was user 520,272 and there are now over 2m and it’s still limited access. No I’ve not added all this up, another developer has created a great app to pull stats together – Twexit.nl

Did you ever use tweekly.fm? A bot for posting last.fm stats to twitter. Well that got killed by X’s API limits, but has now appeared over at BlueSky – lastfm.blue

I’ll finish with one final feature that hopefully will help the platform as it grows. The concept of subscribe-able mute lists. Anyone can create a mute list. So maybe you want to avoid people that post pictures of cats, you’d create one, add the users to it and subscribe. The cats pictures disappear. Others can also subscribe if they want to avoid cat pictures too. It may sound a bit harsh, but it doesn’t stop you posting cats, nor does it doesn’t stop people who like cats from seeing them, you just can choose a topic list to exclude if you want. You can find if you’re on a list (use Twexit.nl) if you really want to know.

The platform is developing all the time, so for example hashtags are just appearing, lists are evolving (from mute lists to also include lists in the twitter sense).

Anyway I’d love to build the legal IT / legal tech community over there, as well as any other topics (but please not polarising politics, leave that to X!!). I’ve a few invite codes available, so if you’re genuinely interested in moving across and adding to the BlueSky community then drop me a line and I’ll happily share a code.

Oh and then follow me @planty.bsky.social

Appendix
Here are some other resources for learning about BlueSky :-
How to Bluesky. This article explains how Bluesky works… | by Nico Mara-McKay | Medium
How I made the ‘Seattle Sport’ custom Bluesky feed | jacklorusso.com

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General IT

Threads : Is this twitters myspace moment? Together with a few thoughts on the upstart (updated).

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For those of a certain age in the UK, “Threads” probably conjures up an image of nuclear destruction (For US people think “The Day After”), it’s not a bad analogy for what may happen to Twitter, now a big player has a clone.

I’ve written in the past about Mastodon (here), lots of people joined but it never stuck if we’re honest, other than as a fringe product. But the entry of Meta with the hard job of building up initial “followers” already done through Instagram, gives it a leg up into the mainstream.

I’ve not seen any law firm marketing teams jumping on yet, but given the number of organisations already on the platform I’m sure many are underway in creating their accounts.

Early impressions are it’s very much a very polished v1. But I thought I’d post few of my first thoughts on what’s missing or what I don’t understand yet and then keep this post updated as it develops.

Timeline – I don’t get this yet. It seems to be algorithm based and is giving me a load of posts from either popular accounts or accounts it thinks I may like from Instagram. This is OK for day one or two but after this it will get annoying, I want to see those I’m following in chronological order, OK the latter isn’t really Meta’s way but at least let me have majority the former.

Follows – this feels a little clunky at the moment, I seem to have to dual approve Instagram accounts. Now this may be just that as people join they’re setting up as private and so my initial “join to Instagram” needs to be approved by them for Threads, so a thread follow only would work in the same way as Twitter?

Lists – But thing missing if the platform wants the power users, I wat to group people by subject.

Web app – I primarily used Twitter through Tweetdeck, these platforms need to have multiple interfaces, not just one app. This isn’t Instagram. Marketing teams will definitely want to use HootSuite, Tweetdeck or one of the other power platforms but normal users need at least a basic web app asap.

API and third parties – they may not be perfect but typically Meta have been fairly good at opening up their products for use by 3rd parties. Sure in the past they have shut some functions down in both Instagram and Facebook, but generally they are fairly open. This is what grew Twitter in the early days and what we’re seeing with Reddit and Twitter now shows a closed shop is a bad idea.

Meta has talked about using the open messaging platform so that a link to Mastodon can happen, this also is the direction of Bluesky (the new product from the original Twitter team) which could really open up a fantastic platform for the future. And it’s really this that led me to the title of this post, this really could be the start of the end for Twitter in the same way Facebook was the end of Myspace, kind of ironic really!

Update 12th July: so after a week I’ve drifted off the platform, the lack of timeline for those I follow only creates too much noise from things I’m not interested and removes ability to start a “thread”. This though seems to be priority for next upgrade so let’s see. Also lack of hashtags makes things a bit clunky, in the early days things like (follow friday) was a great way of following people interested in similar things. I will be back but only once v1.1 lands!

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AI, Machine Learning etc, Manage Matters

It’s life Jim but not as we know it – A refreshingly real ChatGPT story

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I know, I know I’m jumping on a bit of a bandwagon here. Doing what every conference presenter is doing and talking about you know what. But this isn’t a AI is going to take all our jobs post, just a very simple real work example of what it can do and an encouragement to go try it.

Last year I posted up a question on twitter. Just something simple to try and crowd source some definitions for a few common legal tech terms. I got a few comments back, some are in the replies but had others outside the platform. Generally there was no consensus and I think I decided to just use matter management for what I needed and ignore the other two to avoid confusing.

Fast forward to this week and I have been playing around with ChatGPT on OpenAI.com. It took a while to even get started as I kept getting the error:

Turns out this is simple to fix, if you’ve NordVPN installed you need to turn off web protection for the period you use openai as it messes with it for some reason?!?

Anyway I decided to ask ChatGPT what it’s definitions of the above would be, here’s what it came up with:

Practice management, in the context of legal software, refers to the tools and processes used by law firms and legal professionals to manage their day-to-day operations and streamline their business processes. It involves the use of technology to handle various aspects of a law firm’s operations, including client management, case management, document management, timekeeping, billing, and financial management.

Practice management software provides a centralized platform that allows law firms to efficiently manage their practice and deliver high-quality legal services. Some common features of practice management software include:

1. Client and contact management: It helps track client information, communication history, and other relevant details, enabling efficient client relationship management.

2. Case and matter management: It allows for the organization and tracking of cases and matters, including managing deadlines, tasks, and related documents.

3. Document management: It provides tools to create, store, search, and retrieve legal documents, improving document organization and version control.

4. Timekeeping and billing: It enables accurate tracking of billable hours, generation of invoices, and integration with accounting systems for seamless financial management.

5. Calendar and task management: It helps schedule appointments, track deadlines, assign tasks, and manage workflows, improving productivity and ensuring timely completion of work.

6. Reporting and analytics: It offers reporting capabilities to analyze firm performance, track key metrics, and make data-driven decisions.

7. Integration and collaboration: Practice management software often integrates with other tools such as email, document management systems, and accounting software, facilitating seamless collaboration and data sharing.

By utilizing practice management software, law firms can streamline their operations, enhance productivity, improve client service, and effectively manage their business aspects, ultimately leading to increased efficiency and profitability.

I was pretty impressed not just with the definition, but also the speed of the response from the platform and the fact it was so readable. So I asked how it differed from matter management?

Matter management and practice management are two distinct concepts in the legal context, although they are closely related and often overlapping in their functionalities.

Matter management primarily focuses on the management of individual legal matters, such as specific cases, transactions, or legal projects. It involves tracking and organizing information, documents, deadlines, tasks, and communication related to each matter. Matter management software provides a centralized platform to manage the lifecycle of a matter from inception to completion, ensuring efficient and effective management of the specific legal work.

Practice management, on the other hand, encompasses a broader scope and refers to the overall management of a law firm or legal practice. It involves the administrative, operational, and financial aspects of running a legal business. Practice management software provides tools and functionalities to manage various aspects of a law firm’s operations, including client management, case/matter management, document management, timekeeping, billing, accounting, reporting, and other business processes.

While matter management focuses on the management of individual matters, practice management includes the management of the entire law firm’s operations and resources. It encompasses functions such as client intake, staff management, marketing, financial management, strategic planning, and performance analysis. Practice management software provides a comprehensive platform to handle these administrative and business aspects, enabling law firms to streamline their operations and improve efficiency.

In summary, matter management is specifically concerned with the management of individual legal matters, while practice management encompasses the broader management of a law firm or legal practice, including matters, clients, staff, finances, and other operational aspects.

And what about case management?

Case management and matter management are two related but distinct concepts in the legal context.

Case management primarily focuses on the specific legal cases or litigation matters that a law firm handles. It involves the organization and coordination of activities and information related to individual cases. Case management typically includes tasks such as tracking deadlines, managing court filings, monitoring case progress, and coordinating communication among team members, clients, and external parties involved in the case. Case management systems are often used by litigation-focused firms or departments.

On the other hand, matter management has a broader scope and encompasses all types of legal matters handled by a law firm or legal department, including both litigation and non-litigation matters. It involves the overall management of legal matters, including tasks such as client intake, matter assignment, document management, collaboration, timekeeping, billing, and reporting. Matter management software provides a comprehensive platform to manage all aspects of legal matters from initiation to completion, covering both the administrative and substantive aspects of legal work.

While case management is specific to individual legal cases or disputes, matter management encompasses a wider range of legal work, including transactional matters, advisory work, compliance, and general legal operations. Matter management software aims to streamline and centralize the management of all matters, providing a holistic view of the firm’s or department’s workload and resources.

In summary, case management focuses on the management of individual legal cases, while matter management is a broader concept that covers all types of legal matters handled by a law firm or legal department, including litigation and non-litigation matters.

There was quite a lot of text, so I then simply asked it to summarise all of this:

In essence, matter management deals with the management of individual legal matters, practice management encompasses the broader management of a law firm or legal practice, and case management is specifically focused on the management of individual legal cases or litigation matters. These concepts are interconnected and often supported by legal software solutions to streamline operations, improve efficiency, and enhance client service.

What got me is not necessarily the definitions themselves (though they are pretty good) but the fact that the questioning and follow on I gave were the kind of conversational questions that come naturally. I didn’t have to adjust search terms or anything like you would in Google, just asked a logical question as you would of a person in conversation.

It really is pretty impressive!

Like I said at the start this isn’t an “AI will conquer the world” post, more a call to just go and try it. Go to OpenAI.com. sign up and just play around a bit. If nothing else it’ll give you a feel for what it can do and give you some background to question whether or not the answer to that business problem actually is ChatGPT or not.

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Mobility

Can you believe Gen Z have never known life without quality video calling/conferencing! What next for this tech?

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One of my kids turns 21 this year, Gen Z are about to enter the workplace en masse. It got me thinking about technology that has entered the workplace in that time and in particular a product that has come and gone in that time, Telepresence (or Cisco Telepresence to be precise). Who remembers the amazement of their very first telepresence meeting?

Can you believe it only appeared in 2006! For big corporates (and biglaw) having a telepresence room was the thing for a while, yes an actual room that was fitted out to an exact specification for an immersive HD video conference experience.

Fast forward seventeen short years and one pandemic and it seems a kind of quaint old technology. Sure, I know it still exists, but desktop Teams video conferencing and pretty much some kind of video conferencing in every meeting room with high quality video and audio (well mostly!) has made the need for a dedicated video conference suite a bit redundant.

But I caught a new technology via Gerd Leonhard today that made me think maybe we’re in for a new wave of video tech. After all there is a huge push across corporates for sustainability, reduced carbon footprint, travel squeeze etc

The tech in question is Proto “a truly real-life, real-size, realtime, volumetric, holographic display”

Proto Epic

Now at the moment the marketing seems to place it in the entertainment space, presenting, training/education etc, but maybe the Proto suite in the office is the next thing. Rather than push on the metaverse, a more traditional hybrid working route will work, teams get together holographically using either their own office based devices or local rented space?

It’s a step towards what’s really needed to replace those in person collaborative meetings/collaborative time in the office, maybe not quite there yet but until we crack those type of meetings the visit to the office will still be needed as part of the Hybrid working environment.

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Office365

The joy of modern cloud platforms – Great new features that nobody knows about – Teams shared channels

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OK unless you’re someone that devours the tech press or continuously monitors release notes for every release of the particular cloud platform in question this is sadly the case with a lot of platforms. New features will be added that you’ll find out about weeks or months later.

I don’t think I’m too far behind on this one from a general release point of view but if you’re one of the former people then you’ll know this has been tested for a few months!

Teams Shared Channels

A simple concept but I think really useful. Basically two teams with their own Teams (anyone else get confused by this language?!) can share a single channel without having to create another new Team for the two groups of people.

So rather than proliferate the amount of Teams I have to be in, I can simply get a specific channel shared to me and place this channel in a Team of my choosing. See note 1 on this below though.

There are many other scenarios where this could be useful, for example using hierarchies of shared channels where say Architecture could use an announcements channel in their Team where new standards or patterns are communicated, this could be then set as a shared channel that could then be used by other teams, simply adding the channel to their own Teams workspace to see this information rather than having to create another Team to have to goto.

It feels as if this will really improve collaboration, certainly internally but as this is available across tenants maybe externally too.

Note 1: this depends on the way the shared channel is shared. If it is shared to a Team owner, then they can place the channel in a Team of their choosing. If it is shared to an individual person then they will simply see a new Team with a single channel.

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General Legal IT

Is the Legal Tech Bubble Bursting?

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This is the question a few legal news sites have been asking over the last couple of weeks based on the news of Reynen Court. (see here and here).

I’ve had a couple of thoughts after reading these, first a general answer that it’s probably less bursting, but more the general economy contracting and so the availability to finance those nice tech/low business value products is diminished. The valuable tech I’m sure will still survive and thrive still. The demand for tech solutions to drive efficiency and innovate in law firms continues to grow, whatever the conference circuit might say.

The second was more on Reynen Court. It’ll be interesting to see whether they manage their way through, I thought as a concept it was quite intriguing and would probably benefit firms if it succeeded. In particular those firms that were well on their way to cloud platforms (and by that I mean their own modern Azure/AWS application architectures rather than just SaaS or IaaS cloud).

The ability to manage purchase through to deployment all in one place and have the application deployed into your own cloud was quite a compelling technical solution.

I did wonder whether they would achieve the legal tech appstore as I was always a little sceptical whether the vendors themselves would play ball. Firstly whether they would want to hand off that 1-2-1 customer contact, especially the established players, and secondly whether technically the vendors were able to deliver in this container based architecture. Based on experience of simply getting vendors away from COM add-ins in Word made me think this was going to be a long road!!

No one really knows how this next year will play out, but I’ll continue to keep an eye on this tech and in answer to the post title question. No not yet.

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Legal

It’s like an Avatar Sequel – Consolidation within the UK 200

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I wrote a post in 2009 on consolidation in the UK top 200 law firms, I honestly thought that the UK marker would go through a series of mergers and end up with a much much smaller set of firms. But like the film Avatar (also released in 2009) it’s taken 13 years to be able to put out a sequel to that post.

It was a post from The Lawyer that caught my eye this week and reminded me of this topic. The line that jumped out was this one:

This data offers the clearest indication that more consolidation is on its way

13 years it’s taken and still the market is consolidating. This quote

Consider this: the overwhelming majority (94 per cent) of the UK 200’s total £33.47bn revenue is generated by the firms in the top half, leaving just 6 per cent (£2bn) to share between the 100 firms in the lower half

shows that even though the vast amount of revenue is in the top half, that’s still 100 firms! And it’s that top half that I can’t fathom. Of course there will always be a large number of independents in any industry, but you expect the top to consolidate to a handful of players, don’t you? Most markets talk about the Big n, never the Big nnn. Even if you take the Top 10 out (about £17bn) there’s still 90 sharing about £16bn.

So, look out for part 3 of this series in about 2035!

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Document Management, Execute the Matter, Manage Matters

Back to Basics – “Your firm should have a system for managing files, including digital files. All your staff should be aware of this system”

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Remember when matter centricity was a big thing, or when maintaining a good paper file was king and getting e-filing going was hard? This used to be a focus in firms, we’d have workshops at conferences discussing the best electronic template for files, we’d talk about getting metadata detail on documents.

It doesn’t seem a thing anymore, I’d like to think that’s because everyone has it nailed. But I suspect it’s more a broken window scenario and that the deluge of email has let “just enough” creep in.

Anyway a conversation with a colleague recently on this very topic led to me being passed a link to PowerBI Connector for iManage which looks to be a really simple tool to create dashboards to monitor say who is filing and who isn’t. Anyone use this or have other examples of tools, please add to the comments.

But I guess my more fundamental question is; Is it time to get back to basics and start to re-instil those good filing habits. Or maybe to be a bit bold and see if the old documents and email file is still valid for the DMS or whether we need a more fundamental shift in what a file now consists of? Maybe as Matter Centricity was a thing in the early 2000’s that moved us from simple tagging, we need a new shift to a more collaborative multi message approach to the file?

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Execute the Matter, Manage Matters, Prepare Documents

Document Review. It’s An Old Topic But Still Being Refined To This Day!

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Thirteen years ago I was posting about the newcomer on the block (GoogleDocs) and online collaboration, looking at plugins (!!) for Word to enable better functionality for Word. But I suspect the emailing of Word documents, filling up Outlook mailboxes with Mb’s worth of attachments and picking through track changes and comments is still the way of the law firm world.

Well for those who are lucky enough to have moved to the Microsoft365 platform and have access to Word online there is a new way of sharing documents, review mode sharing.

This article sums up the details but essentially people can make suggestions (comments or track changes) or comment on other people’s suggestions without modifying the original document.

It sort of reminds me of Workshare 3 (those Legal IT historians will maybe remember this, the first expansion of Deltaview) and it’s review aspirations, it was the one item most switched off as it proved a business change too far at the time!

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General Legal IT

Competition, what competition? The rise and rise of the LegalTech conglomerates

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Every so often I get an really interesting one pager in my inbox titled “Aggregators in the Legal Technology Market”, it shows all the individual software that fits under about ten or eleven suppliers. So for example, Kira, Clocktimizer, Workshare, Prosperoware, DocsCorp – all owned by the same supplier. Sort of like Proctor & Gamble and Unilever own pretty much all the washing powders brands you can think of!

I’ve blogged about this kind of thing a few times in the distant past, sometimes getting under the skin of one or two companies who insisted their merger or purchase was for the benefit of the customer (rather than for the £’s, $’s or €’s) but then many years later said products were still separate or in some cases the “magic” technology jettisoned completely.

The difference this time is a lot of the companies seem to be running more as a conglomerate, no aim to integrate all the technologies and for some nor to present a user journey through all their individual technologies. Is this a good thing or not? I’m not sure, but I would love to see some kind of capability map across the various applications under each supplier so I could see who covers what. Something I may attempt in a future blog (unless anyone else has done so already, if so let me know in the comments).

I recently had a twitter back and forth with a good friend on the topic of platforms and tight integration vs loosely coupled tools doing specific functions (a topic I also talked about at BLTF 2020 and blogged about here).

To me this has to be a priority for these “conglomerates”, it’s alright having loads of separate apps for separate functions as long as they integrate nicely and have a consistent data model (oh for there to be a nice legal data reference model available in the public domain that vendors could broadly align to). I know some do, but please opt for an open integration rather than a proprietary method/tool to do so. If your applications are great we will buy them from you we don’t need tying into your ecosystem so we have to (Don’t be a facebook, or AOL for those of my generation).

Anyway if you’re interested in the document I mentioned it’s produced by Hyperscale Group and I think you can sign up to receive it on their website.

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