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General Legal IT

Top 5 Legal IT technologies of 2011

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Happy New Year to you all!

Hope you had a good 2010 and I wish you all a great 2011. As per last year I thought I’d try a prediction of the technology areas that I will be big for Legal IT in 2011, so here it is my top 5 2011 list of legal IT technologies.

At #5 we have a new entry: More a grouping of technologies I’ve termed "Glue Tech”. The technology that sits between one or more core Legal IT services. Technology like IntApp that uses information in existing systems and applies logic to other systems. Also bespoke developed applications to join systems in ways that provide extra benefit for the lawyer. I also include workflow and case management applications like VisualFiles in this category, a recent visit to a smaller law firm highlighted some of the benefits joined up applications in VisualFiles can make to a business process.

Down two places at #4 we have Microsoft Lync. I think the instant messaging aspect of lync will continue to push into law firms in 2011, especially with the introduction of Office 2010. But the other features of Lync may take longer than 2011 to become widespread in law firms.

New in at #3 is a technology that will be very familiar, but maybe new to law firms and that is YouTube. Or at least similar online video capabilities, this has huge potential for IT training etc. Think about it, if you’ve a tech problem at home who hasn’t searched for a how-to video from YouTube?

Up three places to this years #2 is Mobile Applications. The Smartphone is here, the iPad is on a march and with Android and BlackBerry tablets are starting to come to market. That mobile application market that has exploded in the consumer arena is surely ready to crack the business market. We just need to crack the risk/IT security aspect to it!

And up two to take this years #1 spot is Office 2010 and Windows 7. Sure it’s not sexy tech and yes it’s Microsoft centric. No, it’s not social or cloud computing, but it is the bread and butter stuff of law firms whether you like it or not. Office 2003 and Windows XP need to retire and this is the year.

So the top tech in legal IT may not be cutting edge, but it reads to me like a true corporate IT list. Nothing frivolous, but no longer 5 years behind. Behind these applications I suspect there will be a push for technologies to control the vast amounts of data law firms are now generating, whether this is cloud or self hosted I’m not sure. If the legal and risk aspects can be ironed out then maybe cloud will start to grow.

As for social computing? I don’t think there will be any killer application that makes it’s way into Legal, but all the top five will bring some degree of social computing with them.

So that’s my five, am I on the mark or way off? Let me know in the comments.

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General Legal IT

End of year review

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So the end of a another year of blogging. I started this blog at the start of 2009, right at the start of real turmoil in the Legal market. The worst recession in decades was in full swing and law firms were in a massive restructuring exercise that for some is still going on some two years later.

Over those two years in terms of Legal IT we’ve seen some of the big names of the past consolidate, some new players emerge and Legal IT become less niche in terms of IT and move closer to the main stream in terms of technology and demands on the IT departments.

In terms of this blog it’s been more successful than I could have imagined, it now averages about 1500 visits per month to the site and about 230 subscribers each day to the RSS feed. And this year I was short listed for the Computer Weekly blog awards.

So all that remains for this year is to take a look at my predictions for the top 5 Legal IT technologies of 2010 made at the start of the year.

#5 Mobile Applications

Well given the proliferation of iPads at ILTA and the rise of the Android and iPhone’s I would say I was right on the mobile device being big in 2010. But what about the Applications? Well until the devices become more widespread I don’t think there will much more than email or document access applications in law firms (there of course are plenty of Apps that can and will be used by lawyers as personal productivity applications).

#4 – Search

Lots of talk in 2010, with a few firms bringing in pilots for enterprise search.  Cost, integration and the “separate application” is holding this back I suspect. For those firms though who are iManage customers the IDOL engine is being introduced as part of their WorkSite 8.5 upgrades, this will bring experience of a major enterprise search engine to those depts.

#3 – Office 2010/Windows 7

Now this may not be “live” in many firms in 2010, but who hasn’t started looking at one of both of these products during 2010?

#2 Instant Messaging

Starting to make waves in 2010. It will be a slow uptake (a bit like email was back in the early 90’s) but like email I’m sure it will take hold. Maybe Lync will bring it front and centre next year?

#1 Speech Recognition

Well I was wrong on this one! Maybe more lawyers typing their own documents combined with good workflow in Digital Dictation systems is enough to cope with the shift in secretarial/fee earner ratios?

So that’s it, I may have been slightly off the mark with some technologies. But the others, maybe I was just a little early but they are starting to make it into some law firms. What do you think? Leave me some comments on what you think have been the main technologies making their mark in Legal in 2010.

So finally to finish 2010 a thank you to Legal IT Professionals who kindly publish my content on their site. And a big thank you to all who read and comment both here and over there. I hope you all have a great Christmas and New Year!

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General Legal IT

Autonomy iManage WorkSite 8.5 and on

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A couple of weeks back I attended the Autonomy iManage (or should that be Autonomy Protect now?) user group in London. There was a good session early on in the afternoon where Autonomy ran through their roadmap for WorkSite. I was struck with a feeling that they were clearly listening to their customer’s needs, in fact some of the indexer additions are almost direct answers to an adhoc customer feedback discussion I attended at ILTA earlier in the year.

So it’s worth blogging some of the highlights of upcoming releases:

WorkSite client SP2

This release is out and you can find details on the support site. But it is worth noting that this is basically a branch of SP1 u3 (all the fixes in that release are in SP2) that just brings Office 2010 compatibility.

WorkSite Indexer 8.5 SP2

In this release there are some improvements in the connector (the fetch state is preserved via checkpoint to save having to start all over again), improvements in the indexing resilience and in disk space protection.

There are also a couple of nice tools that have been added. A diff tool, which will do a health check between your index and the DB. Sort of like the imfcheck between docstore and DB I guess. And the Autonomy Control Centre, a web based tool for monitoring all your indexing components. Allowing you to start/stop services, monitor all log files, messages, metrics etc of all your WorkSite indexer components from one control centre. I think in time the aim is for this to be able to monitor your IUS and EAS indexers too.

Worksite Communication Server 8.5 SP2

This release looks to bring Exchange online support (https support) and also a Mailbox Agent, this allows emails to be marked that have been filed elsewhere in the firm by colleagues (not just those filed by using the luggage tag).

WorkSite 8.5 SP3

This release will be a real plus for Excel users as there is a focus on linking support in Excel sheets. Also this release will see the start of the shift to .NET integration.

There are also some NRL improvements. The ability to have NRL previews in Outlook and NRL links to matter centric containers as well as documents.

WorkSite 9

A lot of what is in 9 I already blogged about from ILTA and this is still:

  • Full Unicode – yes! finally you can file those Chinese and Cyrillic language document descriptions (email subject lines)!
  • Encryption support.
  • Access anywhere – similar protocol to how Outlook client can communicate over https.

There is also now a hybrid security model. You can mix pessimistic and optimistic models. For example, you can have optimistic for grant privileges and pessimistic for revoke. Sort of how windows file store security works.

And maybe not in 9.0 (for which the main focus I believe is Unicode), but certainly earmarked in point releases is further outlook 2010 integration. Starting to exploit some of the new 2010 features of Outlook (conversation threads etc).

Autonomy ACA

Finally there was a quick mention of the Archiving ACA product. Autonomy Consolidated Archiving, this allows the archiving of many different types of content in an on or offsite archive. They are looking at a migration path from EAS too. Given the volumes of data law firms now deal with this product could be very interesting.

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Legal

“A company from here doing rather well over there” and vice versa

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No I didn’t stop blogging over the last three weeks to spend the time on the campaign trail for the Computer Weekly blog awards! I’ve just had too much on in and out of work to come up with something to blog about (which reminds me of a previous post!)

I’ve had in mind a post about the mergers in legal this year. A follow up to the post I put up in July 2009 titled “Consolidation within the UK 200?” in which I predicted a series of mergers outside the top 20. I thought at the time that the competition in the legal market due to the downturn would force a squeeze in the mid-sized firms, but it looks like the consolidation has been nearer the top. There have been a number of transatlantic mergers within the top 20 (well top 25), not the “magic circle” but in those firms just below (in fact those below the transatlantic trailblazer DLA Piper).

We’ve had Denton Wilde Sapte and Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, Hammonds and Squire Sanders & Dempsey, Lovells and Hogan & Hartson and SJ Berwin in talks with Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe and then Proskauer Rose.

Norton Rose has taken a slightly different route into North America with it’s merger with Canadian firm Ogilvy Renault. It’s almost a shame UK law firms aren’t listed on the stock exchange as I’d be hedging a bet and buying up some shares in Herbert Smith!

So the consolidation is happening at a pace, but rather than on a national level it’s the globalisation of the larger law firms that’s leading the way.  I don’t think it’s over, there is still a mixed market out there. Some firms are now posting a rise in turnover, yet there are others that are posting an equal percentage drop.

I therefore stand by my earlier post. The consolidation at the top will only strengthen the brands of the large law firms, allowing them to hoover up more of the big (and medium) plc work. The mid sized firms will be subject to a pincer movement from the “big brand firms” above and also from the new firms that will emerge on the back of the Legal Services Act 2007.

What will the mid sized law firm look like in 5 years time? Will the £75m turnover “Jones, Jones and Smith” still exist or will they be background engine rooms for “Tesco” and “Sainsbury’s” in a legal world that has a few global big brand firms and household name branded legal services?

Whilst writing this post I came across a great document on the upcoming “Big Bang” for legal, it’s called “The Big Bang Report – Opportunities and threats in the new legal services market”.

Oh and no I didn’t win the IT professional (male) blogger award unfortunately, but it was great to be recognised by Computer Weekly and short-listed. Maybe next year!

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General Legal IT, Technical, WorkSite Tips & Tricks

A WorkSite question – one library = one fileshare?

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This blog post is a question to other legal IT teams, especially those that support Autonomy iManage’s WorkSite product. The question came to me after I re-read the post by @jbtrexler on the excellent blog electronic file 2.0.

It’s about storage underneath WorkSite and a realisation that after six years of supporting the product I’ve never really needed to get to grips with the underlying file management of the product.

The question though is simple. For a single WorkSite library or database, can I have the physical documents stored across numerous shares? So for my Matters library could I have the documents stored on a matters1 share on say one array of disks and a matters2 on another?

At some point I’ve been led to believe not, but am I wrong?

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General IT, General Legal IT, Outlook 2010 series

Outlook 2010 – a legal viewpoint – the final say

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This is a short post, but it’s something I missed off the previous Outlook 2010 post. It’s to note a feature of Outlook 2010 that I forgot to include, but that I think will be very useful to lawyers (as well as Legal IT staff, Knowledge Management staff etc etc).

RSS feeds into the Inbox!

There used to be a great add-in to Outlook (Newsgator Inbox) from a company called Newsgator. This brought RSS feeds into Outlook, allowing you to read your RSS feeds in an Outlook style interface. I used this for some years until I switched to their stand alone FeedDemon product when they acquired that. Newsgator switched focus a while ago to SharePoint, but for those that were aware of Newsgator Inbox then the Outlook 2010 functionality is very similar.

Basically you have an RSS Feeds folder in Outlook and in here you can add feeds. This allows a very familiar interface from which lawyers can use RSS feeds (without the need for further training of yet another product).

No Option RSS feed in Outlook 2010

As they are in your Outlook profile they follow you around from machine to machine in your organisation (similar to the synchronise function that was available in Newsgator Inbox). See below for the posts available in Outlook Web Access under Exchange 2003.

For those of you that use Google Reader, unfortunately there is no way to synchronise with your Google Reader feeds as yet. But you can import OPML files into Outlook 2010 (OPML = Outline Processor Markup Language – an open standard format which can be used to import/export feed entries from one service to another). Take a look at this article if you want to know how. This could also be an easy way to populate a set of feeds that would be useful to a specific set of lawyers.

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General IT, General Legal IT, Outlook 2010 series

Outlook 2010 – a legal viewpoint – part 3

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It’s been a couple of months since I last blogged about my thoughts on Outlook 2010. You can read my previous two posts here and here (and on the Legal IT Professionals site, here and here) or you can just use the Office 2010 Series category to the right.

This post is a look at the presence, contacts and social connector features in Outlook 2010.

First let’s look at the contact cards. In the contacts folder there isn’t anything revolutionary, it’s pretty much the same as previous versions. But it’s the exposure of this contact information in other parts of Outlook that is a nice addition in 2010.  Just hover over a contact anywhere in Outlook (on an appointment, an email address etc) and you get the following pop-up displayed:

outlook-contacts

From here you can do a number of things. You can of course use the arrow in the bottom right to get more details of the contact. This can be information from your contacts folder or information held about people in your organisation address books.

But in addition from this pop-up you can start integrating into other parts of Outlook. So click on the email icon to send an email to the person or the icon to schedule a meeting (where it will show their availability where the contact is in your organisation).

Also from here you start to see the integration into other Microsoft products. So if you have Office Communicator in your organisation, you can see the presence of the contact (i.e. whether they are online, in a meeting, away, busy etc), you can start an IM (instant messaging) conversation or initiate a phone call with the person. Just like the rest of Office 2010 it’s all about having the right functionality available in the right place!

Another nice addition is the “Suggested Contacts” folder. This looks at the emails you send and builds up a collection of contacts for you. Initially you think “in most cases won’t that just be the email address and maybe a name?” Not necessarily!

Let’s look at how Outlook 2010 expands the contact card within the new People Pane and also allows you to expand it further with “social connectors”.

outlook-peoplepane

This area, below the email reading pane, works in a similar way to Xobni for those that have used that application. You can see an example above. In the top right of the people pane are all the contacts from the email (To:, CC: etc), click on a contact and you see details of other emails from that person, appointments you have with the person or attachments you have received from the person.

If you’ve got one of the Outlook Social Connectors installed then you can also see social media status updates, RSS feeds etc from the person. In the above image you can see I have the Linkedin social connector installed, this would be an excellent addition to Outlook 2010 for lawyers. As clients or prospective clients email you (or are cc’d in emails to you) you can immediately see information from their linkedin profile!

There are also social connectors for facebook, windows live messenger and myspace available from Microsoft at the moment.

But in addition there is a Social Connector Software Development Kit available from Microsoft, so there is the opportunity for law firms to develop their own social connectors. The obvious one is to pull richer information on internal contacts from intranets or people databases the firm may have.

Looking to the world of third party legal IT vendors, this has to be a great area for CRM in law firms. LexisNexis surely have to develop a connector for InterAction! It would be a perfect addition, allowing lawyers to instantly see up to date information on clients.

Also for Knowledge Management, a connector into the DMS (document management system) or Knowledge Management Systems to see documents or content authored by a particular contact within the organisation.

With all the added functionality and the flexibility in Outlook 2010 the difficult job for those Project Managers having to run the Office 2010 projects is where to draw that line under your project scope!

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General Legal IT

Rolling out WorkSite 8.5

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I’ve been struggling over the last couple of weeks to come up with a subject to post about. Is this what people call writers block? It’s mainly down to being focussed on a particular project at work which has lead me to think about little else in the Legal IT field.

We’ve been gearing up to rolling out Autonomy’s iManage WorkSite 8.5 product together with the EMM (email management module). It’s been building up throughout the year, building VM environments, rolling out IDOL and Email Filing Servers etc. But it’s these last few weeks when the end users have started to get the software.

We started with a small field test and followed with a couple of pilots in London and Madrid, then this weekend was the big one. Six offices in one go, across four countries!

We’ve had some challenges with it, but on the whole I think the fee earners will like the product. If all goes well I’ll post up some coal face views of the software in the coming weeks!

On another note, this week I got short-listed for the Computer Weekly blog awards 2010! So if you’d like to vote for me (Jason Plant) you can do so over at the Computer Weekly site (or just take a look at the other shortlisted blogs).

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General Legal IT

Office 2010 – Legal IT vendors polish your interfaces

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During a recent one day introduction course to Office 2010 in Leeds, I started thinking how much work Legal IT providers are going to have to put in to really get their products to integrate successfully with Microsoft’s latest offering. The reason is Microsoft have clearly put a lot of thought into Office 2010 in terms of usability. Once you’ve adjusted to using the ribbon interface, you realise that things are exactly where you need them and that a lot of things you want to do that were previously multi clicks have been made much slicker.

Naturally my initial thoughts were about DMS (Document Management System) integration, after all this is more or less a standard add-on to Office in law firms. During the day I started to scribble down some questions in my course notes and I’ve bullet pointed a few of these below. These are areas where I think the integration of a DMS and Office has to be really slick (I’m ignoring the obvious Open, Save dialogues). It’s not aimed at any particular DMS providers solution (in fact I haven’t seen any of them running in Office 2010 yet) it’s more a general view of where I think integration has to happen well.

  • First off the new Office “backstage” page, particularly in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. There are numerous places where integration needs to happen here.
    • The Recent tab – the DMS surely must replace the Recent Documents, Recent Workbooks, Recent Presentations list with the recent documents from the DMS (filtered by the Office application you are in). Also the Recent Places has to be replaced with recent folders or the Matter file in matter centric DMS’s surely.
    • The Info tab – an obvious place to pull in the DMS profile information of the open document from the Document Management System. Also “Permissions” on this page is calling to be replaced by or integrated with the DMS security options.
    • Versions – you’ll also see this on the “Info” tab and this is Microsoft adding to the confusion with what they call file versions (or if you want a true description its the saving a document that you might want in case you close it without saving feature!). The DMS providers will need to factor in the terminology to avoid confusion. Ideally they will also want to factor in the new functionality available here as the feature is a useful one!

Within Outlook there are a number of challenges for those DMS’s that handle email (which is most now as this is a big part of the electronic file)

  • The Conversation thread – Outlook now shows all parts of the conversation grouped together, even if some of the emails in the thread are stored in sub folders. What will happen if some emails in the thread are filed in the DMS? I think this will be a popular view in Outlook 2010 and so some thought will need to take place of how this will work with an integrated DMS.
  • The attachment preview tab in emails – this needs to function if the attachment is a DMS link doesn’t it?

I’ve picked on DMS providers, but the same goes for comparison tools, PDF creation tools, template management systems etc. They need to work within the new Office interface in a way that is seamless to the lawyer, rather than feeling as though it is a bolt on to the Office product. So for example a compare tool needs to be where I’d expect, in the Review section of the ribbon in Word. A template management system would integrate perfectly in the New tab in the “backstage” page.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the new generation of lawyers will start to demand better software. Software that works like an application on a smartphone with an interface designed to make things easier! If legal IT providers don’t think about their integration with Office 2010 they’ll stand out like a sore thumb (and probably give the lawyer as much grief as one too!)

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Legal

Brazil 1 China 2, India 0 Russia 1 – law firms in BRIC

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I sometimes think international law firms are a little like sheep, one sets up in a country and many more follow. But I suspect this is the same in any industry when new markets open, someone is first in but the others soon follow.

The current trend is clearly the BRIC (Brazil Russia India and China) economies, with many firms already established in China and Russia it was Brazil’s turn to be the current destination of choice.

That was until last week when the Brazilian Bar ruled against associations with foreign law firms. This decision isn’t the eviction of all the international firms yet, but it’s a possible step in that direction. As with the continued block on foreign law firms praticing in India it seems a tale of two halves in BRIC. China and Russia happy to accept the foreign law firms, India and Brazil not.

So who’s got it right?

Clearly from a free market point of view, China and Russia are right. And it’s suggested that merger activity in the trans-atlantic market is being driven by the lure of China. But clearly India and Brazil are using the infant industry argument for protectionism. Can this work though for a service firm? In a globalised world won’t business in these countries suffer through lack of access to the global reach of international law firms?

My personal view is that the markets need to open up.

The main asset of a law firm is the lawyers, whichever market the big law firms go into they will need lawyers and most of the time it’s local lawyers that will be used along with a few lawyers transferred to the country. So I think that the access to knowledge in these global firms will accelerate the development of the local lawyers in these markets. And eventually lead to experienced local lawyers leaving and setting up their own Indian and Brazilian firms. Using the knowledge of global markets they have gained they will be better prepared when they decide to expand and set up shop in London and New York.

India should really look at their own IT industry as an example, it’s now the development centre of many global IT organisations (Microsoft employs about 5000 people in India and even Legal IT provider Autonomy has an R&D centre in Bangalore). This has led to a rapid growth in the IT sector in India, not just in global firms but home grown enterprises.

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