I decided I needed some stimulus to get blogging again, so I’ve set myself a little challenge for the week. I’m not sure I’ll make it, but here’s what I’m going to do. I can’t make ILTA 2012 so I’m going to virtually join you all in Washington, the challenge for myself is a post a day for the duration of the conference. Each evening (UK time) I will pick out what I think will be interesting sessions from the following day and post some of my thoughts on the topic. Simple right?

Day One (Monday 27th August) sessions

A Winning Future with Windows 8  (Monday 11am, Hashtag #ETPG1) 4pm UK time

Be interesting to hear what people say are the benefits for Windows 8 in a law firm. I’ve used it for a few weeks now and initially I raved about it, as a consumer user it is excellent. If I had my email in Hotmail/Gmail, used social media, music & videos and played a few games then it’s great and the “metro” interface is simple and effective. However I progressed onto more “desktop” functions and the interface started to irritate me. And this is what I would call my “work interface”. The nub of the problem is that corporate applications are not designed for it and this for me will be the sad fate for Legal IT, vendors are failing to keep up with Office 2010 and Windows 7. The fundamental shift in thinking of the interface in Windows 8 means I can’t see it working in Legal IT. Which is a crying shame as on a tablet this OS will be fantastic!

Vendors please prove me wrong.

Office 2010 … Sans the Add-Ins (Monday 1pm, Hashtag #DASPG2) 6pm UK time

One simple answer for this, “Yes please”!! I would love to be in this session, this is the ultimate goal for Office in Legal IT. In our firm we’ve 18 or 19 add-ins that load within Outlook 2010 alone (depending on your persona), just to halve the number would be excellent. Sure with our latest i5 processor machines with SSD storage it’s quick enough for now, but 3 or 4 years into the life cycle? Please if you go to this session, tweet lots using the hashtag!

A Business Case for Lync 2010 Unified Communications (Monday 1pm,  Hashtag #TECH2) 6pm UK time 

Desktop Videoconferencing Apps: Finally Ready for the Enterprise (Monday 2:30pm, Hashtag #DASPG3) 7:30pm UK time

Doing these two together as they cover similar ground. The time is definitely now. We’ve had Lync for over a year now and it transforms your way of working in multi office law firms. It’s not just the video conferencing either, you get presence (being able to see who’s available right now), IM (use lots, cut down the email!) and the low call costs (think how much you save calling international using Skype, then multiply by the numbers in your offices and the calls you make in a day!). I’ve said before, Lync to me feels like email back in the early 90’s. It’s a internal corporate tool now, but in a few years it’ll spread out to your clients and firms start to “federate” with each other.

Using Your DMS for Knowledge Management (Monday 2:30pm,  Hashtag #KMPG3) 7:30pm UK time

Just be interested to hear how firms are achieving this. Is it through bolt on enterprise search engines? If so are additional taxonomy tools used to fill in the lack of flexible custom meta data with current DMS systems? I can see how it can be achieved using separate managed libraries, but are people leveraging the documents in situ, weeding out the mountains of irrelevant material and finding the knowledge they are after?

Matter Centricity and the Impact on Lawyer Efficiency (Monday 2:30pm, Hashtag #THO2) 7:30pm UK time

Really? Are we still talking about matter centricity in 2012? Come on own up, who’s not doing it?

The End of Training? (Monday 4pm, Hashtag #DASPG4) 9pm UK time

It’s time for YouTube isn’t it? I mean when you need to fix you home PC or need to learn how to do that function in a piece of software at home what do you do?

Google it, watch it.

A cheap HD camcorder and a low cost video editing tool, all we need is a vendor to offer cost effective YouTube type infrastructure for us to use inside the law firm (after all some training material we may not want to share on YouTube).

Autonomy, an HP Company: One Year In (Monday 4pm, Hashtag #SV4) 9pm UK time

All the vendors seem to have the following notes this year “This session is open to ILTA Law Firm and Law Department Members ONLY”, I know IP is valuable but really?

Anyway, yes it’s been a year so will be interesting to hear what is said. Or will the hashtag be redacted?