Category Archives: General Legal IT

General Legal IT

Which mobile platform do you think will become the leading platform in law firms?

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I’ve had this question on a poll on my site for a few months now and thought as it had passed about 150 votes it should give a reasonable indication of what Legal folk think. Now clearly with an online poll there will be a fairly wide margin of error, but I figure for every Apple fan who votes without thinking there will be a BlackBerry (BB) fan doing the same. So hopefully some of the error will be nullified.

Unsurprisingly the Apple iPhone topped the poll with 46% thinking it will become the leading platform. Safe to say that most vendors think this too with the majority of Legal IT apps appearing on this platform first (or in the case of many only on this platform), also a lot of the MDM/MAM (Mobile Device/Application Management) providers think the same and provide iOS with a level of control above all other platforms.

What came next is the interesting result. Up second was Windows Phone 8 with 23% thinking it will be the leading platform in law firms, beating the other two who got a fairly equal share (BB10 at 16% and Android at 15%). Android was interesting as in the consumer market this OS dominates the smartphone arena. Does the fragmentation of the OS and lack of controls give an impression of it not being manageable or secure enough for the enterprise? As for BB10 I suspect its newness accounts for its position. It remains to be seen whether the promise clearly shown by Windows Phone can translate into market penetration in the legal enterprise.

Final thought though is if I had put “Old BlackBerry” on the list and highlight a little more the costs, in particular roaming costs, would the %’s change significantly? I think all the UK networks are putting the BB10 on a smartphone tariff, thus removing the in built cost control of unlimited managed data anywhere in the world that you had with the old BB’s. This alone for a lot of firms with a high number of travellers could ramp up costs significantly.

So as you can see I’ve swapped the poll on the right and I’d be interested in learning the thoughts of the Legal market on this. Get voting!

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General Legal IT

Digital drafting and DMS users looking for change

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Reading through the latest Legal IT Insider this evening a couple of articles caught my eye. The first was an opinion piece by Charles on document automation, or digital drafting as he suggests. This area of technology has always struggled to get off the ground in law firms, I know I first looked at it over 10 years ago. I guess in the boom years the thought of spending time and effort in creating something that meant you actually billed the client less seemed a little bit of an eccentric thing to do? Also I think the technology was cumbersome and beyond the Word skills of the lawyer of yesteryear.

But there does seem to be a renewed appetite for it now, the reasons are clear to see in the drive to keep costs low for clients yet maintain profitability within the firm. But I do like the term digital drafting, it does describe what it actually is much better. A fast way to a draft rather than a fully automated process. Technology rarely replaces, but it often makes time consuming jobs easier.

The second was an article on Worldox, a tweet I saw that quoted Ray Zwiefelhofer stood out this afternoon, “DMS (document management system) users are looking for change. We will be their next choice”. I’ve been pondering this for some time as you know if you’ve followed this blog, DMS hasn’t really changed much since the Hummingbird v iManage battle at the turn of the century. I’ve not seen the latest from Worlddox nor have I seen the other DMS that Charles says “could be the SharePoint DMS to finally break into the major league”, Go Legal. But I know what I would like a DMS to be, it would:

  • have a highly scalable, low maintenance (that rules out SharePoint then 😉 ) server infrastructure that could be hosted in the cloud, on premise or as a hybrid model
  • it would provide the core DMS and Email Management filing capabilities expected
  • it would have some basic integration to MS Office shipped with the product
  • but key to it would be a modern comprehensive, yet simple API
    • my thinking on this came about due to two apps, on the Windows Phone platform there is no official Instagram app but a developer has used their API to create 6gram which from early reviews looks even better than the real thing. The other app is on the iPhone and is the mailbox app, it hooks into GMail and provides a simple way to file and deal with email. Just think a feature rich, modern, open API to a DMS could lead to an explosion of different interfaces on a multitude of platforms! Each serving difference needs of the end users in simple intuitive ways.

That’s my dream for DMS!

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General Legal IT

Bighand for Windows Phone 8

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I tweeted about this last Friday but thought I would expand on that in a short blog post. All the naysayers can c0ntinue to knock Microsoft’s mobile platform, the refuseniks can refuse to educate themselves about the platform and confuse it with the old Windows Mobile platform. But it’s harder to keep this up as the Windows Phone ecosystem slowly chips away at the smartphone market, from taking the third spot from BlackBerry to overtaking the iPhone in emerging markets.

But it’s the emerging trend for key apps to appear on the platform for me that is the best sign of the platform being taken seriously. And the Legal IT space is a case in point as Bighand are about to release their mobile dictation product for Windows Phone 8.

It’s been redesigned to take advantage of the Windows Phone “Metro” interface. The app is designed to take your phone’s theme and match itself to it, both in style and colour scheme.

bighand1

All the key functions are available from the opening screen (as shown below) with record dictation as a wide tile at the very top.

bighand2Each of the tiles below (to show all dictations, unsent dictations etc) can be pinned to your home screen where each one would act as a live tile giving you instant updates as to how many dictations are at what stage.

Going into these tiles gives a very familiar look to a Windows Phone user, care has been taken throughout the app to ensure the user experience is close to what you would expect within the platform.

bighand3And the screen for dictating has been “flattened” to ensure it feels “Windows Phone” like.

bighand4bighand5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ability to attach photos to the dictation is added here as well, allowing you to take a snapshot of a receipt or note and send it with the dictation. The dictation can then be profiled if this is turned on within your Bighand set up, the dropdowns for these are pulled from the server.

bighand6

Overall this app is both great for Windows Phone and a great bonus for Bighand who now will support all four main mobile platforms!

 

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General Legal IT

BYOD article written for Managing Partner magazine

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Back in March I wrote an article for Managing Partner magazine. I was asked to hold back on publishing myself for a few months, but now you can read the post in full here.

Managing Partner March 2013

It’s an interesting time to be in corporate IT, the booming consumer technology market is starting to flood into the corporate space and along with it comes a whole heap of problems and challenges. New buzz words are starting to dominate marketing material and new products are touted as answers to these challenges.

So when asked to write an article looking at the emerging technology for lawyers and their clients it was hard to decide where to start. But I’m going to pick two of these “buzzwords”, two that have been around for some time but I think will emerge from the hype and will now start to make a difference in Legal IT. Those two are BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and The Cloud.

BYOD

The consumer market in technology has accelerated way past the corporate world in the past few years, largely thanks to Apple and its iPhone and iPad. No longer is a lawyer happy with a standard BlackBerry and a plain old corporate laptop. The challenge for Legal IT (in fact any corporate IT department) is that the simplicity and flexibility people have at home they now want in the office and they also want it in a device that looks good. So the law firm board member now wants those papers on his or her iPad rather than stapled together in their briefcase.

For the IT department, that could historically control the computers it looked after and more importantly could control and secure the data on those computers, the flexibility and loss of control on personal devices is a big worry. However it will be a very brave IT department that continues to stand by the old ways and refuses to allow their end users the ability to bring in and use their own tablet or smartphone, not least because they’ll go and do it anyway!

So how do you maintain the control and security of the firm’s data?

It depends on the device; each device will have a different requirement for how the data is used.

BYOD

On the one side is the smartphone which is built around an “App” whereas at the other is the traditional PC with it’s desktop integration, the tablet fits in the middle as it can be used to consume and use both.

Securing the data on these devices can therefore be about securing the “App” right through to providing a secure way to access the firm’s desktop on the device. This is a fast moving space at the moment, but some of the key players that provide solutions to manage this are: Citrix, Mobile Iron, Good Technologies and the new BlackBerry Fusion application. These solutions offer ways to control the devices that you allow to access your corporate networks. They can allow you to control the Apps and services on those devices, auto configure things like WiFi and email, allow you to control and wipe data and Apps selectively and even provide white lists (and black lists) of Apps you can install on the devices. They are designed to allow you to keep the firms data separate from the user’s personal data.

Effectively these solutions are bringing the control and security the BlackBerry gave to corporate IT departments to a variety of devices. They also aim to keep the control of the data that belongs to the firm whilst allowing the device as a whole to be freely used as a personal device.

So what happens to the BlackBerry in the legal arena then? BlackBerry has just launched their new version and with it they bring some new features to assist in this personal/corporate split.

BlackBerry 10

BlackBerry 10 or BBX is the new operating system for the good old BlackBerry device and it brings with it “BlackBerry Balance”, this is a feature that lets you toggle between two profiles on the smartphone. A personal profile and a work profile. This allows corporate policies and controls to be placed on the work profile, yet leave the personal profile more open.

It will be interesting to see how the new BlackBerry fares in a crowded smartphone market, especially as the BYOD solutions (including their own BlackBerry Fusion solution) mentioned previously allow the control of data across a wider range of devices on the other three platforms (Apple, Android and Windows Phone). Even security conscious government departments have cleared the iPhone (CESG, GCHQ’s data security arm cleared the iPhone for Level 3 data, that data deemed restricted, in late 2012).

Another emerging area in the BYOD space is around tablets. We all know how phenomenally popular the iPad has been and how it has seen off some rivals (notably the BlackBerry Playbook), but this year I think will see the rise of a couple of challengers. On one side the Android tablets led currently by the successful Nexus 7 and I think as the year goes on from the Windows 8 platform.

Windows 8

It’s still early days for Windows 8 and it’s fair to say early impressions of the Microsoft Surface RT tablet device have been mixed. I think a lot of the negative reviews have come from the confusion in the way the software runs in either the “Desktop” or as an “App”, once you understand this it makes the perfect sense why there are two versions of the surface tablet (the RT and the “Pro” versions) and helps to see where the roadmap is leading.

The “desktop” world can be easily explained as the way every piece of software runs that you currently have on your Windows 7 desktop. So Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, iTunes etc are all desktop software. Microsoft supports this world in Windows 8, however the desktop is now tucked away below a new “desktop tile” on the start screen. You can pin a tile for Word to the start screen, but launch it and it opens in that desktop space. So the desktop as you know it from the windows 7 world is effectively a layer below this new start screen.

New in Windows 8 though is a development platform, this is where the “Apps” come in. Adobe may create the next version of Photoshop as an “App”, and you launch it in the same way from a tile on the start screen, but this time it doesn’t switch into the desktop environment to run. It just runs the “App” basically like your iPad or iPhone does.

The “desktop” world still requires you to install the software in the same old way; the “App” world though transitions the software into an AppStore (Windows Store). For now most of the Legal IT world consists of desktop software and until such time that vendors start to build “App” versions of this software there is an argument to say stick with Windows 7. The shift has started though, OpenText already provide a Windows 8 App to access their document management system.

Once you’ve understood the split above the tablet versions make a bit more sense. The Surface RT tablet will just run the “Apps”, it won’t run the “Desktop” software. To run those you will need a Surface Pro tablet whose release is imminent. Why the split? Well the RT kit has different hardware “underneath the bonnet” and is designed to need much less power, hence much longer battery life (think iPad rather than laptop battery life).

The flexibility of this RT/Pro environment could be of huge benefit to users who travel a lot (lawyers?) as with “Pro” you have a true laptop replacement. You can use the device as a tablet with the “Apps” then connect a mouse and keyboard and use as a desktop PC! Microsoft see this and are launching new versions of their Office Suite (Office 2013), these are the usually fully featured versions of Word and Excel for when in desktop mode, but that also have a new “finger friendly” interface, so that when in tablet mode you can still use your email or read a document with ease.

One interesting feature of Office 13 is the shift to cloud. This seems a nod to the consumer world and allows you to store your documents in the cloud to allow access wherever you have an internet connection. So using file open in Word, for example, no longer has the hard drive (C: drive) front and centre, instead you will see SkyDrive. SkyDrive is Microsoft’s DropBox or Google Drive, your documents in the cloud.

Cloud data

It’s strange to see SkyDrive in the mix as traditionally Office is a corporate product rather than a consumer one, and I can’t really see firms being too happy that their documents are hosted, who knows where in Microsoft’s cloud. However it is more the concept that Office is bringing. The one that your documents can be available anywhere you have an internet connection.

Now most law firms have had an internal document “cloud” for some time in their DMS (document management systems), this has only been available if you were on your firms network. There is now a big scramble in Legal IT to provide a “corporate dropbox”.

A number of vendors are looking to exploit their technologies that are already on the desktops of lawyers. To add functionality to their products to load documents into the cloud, thus allowing access by the lawyers on their own devices and also to allow their clients direct access to the documents.

Workshare’s recent merger with SkyDox well and truly puts them in this space as they look to leverage their Workshare Professional product to help collaboration with clients in the cloud. HP Autonomy is also looking to exploit their ubiquitous DMS with the ability to synchronise with a “dropbox” solution that would be available to clients and lawyers own devices. Netdocuments having always being in the cloud are well placed in this space too. These are just a few vendors to look at solutions in this space and I’m sure a wander round the vendor hall at the Legal IT show will unearth many more!

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General Legal IT

I can only start this post one way…”corporate dropbox”

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As it’s been a while since the last post (my thoughts have been elsewhere during May and June) I’m going to stick to some familiar ground until I’m back in the swing of writing; so a post on documents. In particular the “dropbox” conundrum. Although I will mention a few of Legal IT contenders in this space and the challenges they will have, I’m not going to go into detail of how their products work. No, the question for me is where does the DMS (document management system) fit into all this and is it (corporate dropbox) a direction we want to go in?

It was Office 2013 that started me thinking about this again, with its switch from “C:\” being the default File location to having SkyDrive front and centre. A colleague had sent me this comment during a discussion on Office 2013 and Windows 8:

“The move to SkyDrive and other features such as Office on demand point to a big shift in Office not been seen as just on a PC in the office but giving you the ability to access your information anywhere. The question will be will Legal DMS’s be able to handle this type of mobility, I suspect we know that answer already. Which if the answer is no that then raises a bigger question, is [insert any DMS here]  the right platform for us going forward.. ?”

Mobility for me is the key here, why else do people use “dropbox” or “skydrive”. It’s mobility of the data, whether that is to access the content on your Surface or iPad or on your PC at home. And as I alluded to there are a few of the Legal IT big names that are moving into this space. In particular, Workshare and HP Autonomy. Both look to leverage their existing products in Legal IT. Workshare Platform thus integrates into the workflow of their Workshare Professional products to move the document from desktop to “cloud” (see video below)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wlY8tDdoy6E#at=178

 

HP Autonomy LinkSite leverages the workspace concept in WorkSite to move the document from the DMS to the “cloud”. Each of them have platforms to facilitate mobility, whether tablet apps or desktop folder synchronisation. Another option out there is DocAuto’s connector that integrates WorkSite with the Citrix onsite or offsite ShareFile system. This allows you to publish documents into your ShareFile for mobility.

To me though these are addons to a document system that law firms already have, in the cost conscious current environment will law firms pay for the licences for a “corporate dropbox”? Yes I know it’s more secure etc but let’s say it’s £100 per seat (a guess) , for a 1000+ person lawfirm that’s a six figure investment. Maybe with security on a par with costs in CIO’s thoughts the risk avoidance will win, but more likely  the outcome will be stalemate ie no “corporate dropbox”, but heavier restrictions on dropbox, google drive etc. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this article written by Jeffrey Brandt. (which this morning was shown to be a hoax, although this highlights an issue, it isn’t helpful in “selling” a secure alternative to dropbox – meaning unauthorised use of public versions continues!).

The answer to the costs for me is for the vendors to tailor the products as Apple do with Apps and have “in app purchases”. So the basic “dropbox” functionality is free, you then pay for the value added stuff “in App”. So that could be integration with the DMS or Document comparison in the cloud etc.

But back though to the fundamental question, shouldn’t this be a function of the DMS? I think this is one of three key areas DMS vendors need to start answering going forward:

  1. Should email be stored in the DMS? The physical email I mean, I think a view of emails in the matter file should be.
  1. Should just a basic search be a function of the DMS and more complex searching become part of an enterprise search portal?
  1. Mobility. How will the DMS cater for the dropbox, iPad, Windows 8 world?

And for item three there is one key question for the rest of us, are we ready for the security challenges ahead in this space or will we retreat to our “safe cave” of technology?

Floors open guys, what do you think?

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General Legal IT

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate” so is it time for Lync, Yammer and HighQ?

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I’ve been thinking about communication within law firms for a while, thinking there has to be a better way than email. For a few years in my new year top 5’s I’ve had instant messaging within law firms or more specifically Microsoft’s Lync platform, this is starting to take off now and I suspect for those adhoc short emails it is slowly becoming a replacement.

But I tweeted last year about how Lync still feels like email systems back in the early 90’s, they were mainly internal mail systems with no link between firms and people external to the firm. It was only when email was “set free” that it really took off and became the deluge it is now, so I think until federation really takes off linking Lync systems between firms and individuals (via Microsoft’s Skype) it will only make a small dent in helping reduce our email mountain.

Another Microsoft product that is making some waves within law firms is Yammer. For those not used to Twitter, Yammer can bring some confusion. “How is this different to sending a message via Lync?” I’ve heard asked. I answered this in a tweet last year, Internal “broadcasts” = Yammer, Conversations = Lync, What’s left = email. There is some overlap between them all off course, but primarily I think these are what should be used for each type of communication.

You do need to be a little wary with Yammer though. First off it’s in the cloud, it isn’t solely stored within your firm. The second issue is the security. The free model has a method of authentication that allows access as long as you can confirm your login via an authenticated email domain. So if you are using the free version care needs to be taken about what is communicated. To explain in some more detail how the free model works, lets take a firm jasonplant which has an email domain of jasonplant.co.uk. So if I sign up with my email I will get an authentication link sent to my jasonplant.co.uk email address, so there is a check to see whether you work for the firm. However, if I leave the firm my email stays valid. Others in the firm can mark that I have left and this will trigger an email to re-authenticate (if I’ve truly left my email will have been retired of course and/or I won’t have any access to the firms email system). Of course beyond the free version there is a paid for enterprise version of Yammer, here security ramps up with IP filtering, synchronisation with the firms user access systems, single sign on, enterprise administration etc

This weekend I’ve been involved in an important piece of work, something that started off in a very sudden way on Friday afternoon and involved people from Leeds to Melbourne via Amsterdam, Dubai and Hong Kong. Looking back at how this played out I think it would have been great to spin up a Yammer type “community” to allow all the relevant people to communicate and share information around this specific piece of work. Once completed the “community” could have been dissolved. In this case email was our tool, but as most people will agree with it isn’t the ideal tool in this situation.

I think Yammer could be an answer to this “community” communication, there is also some fantastic work being done by HighQ Solutions which hopefully will be great at bringing these communities together allowing the relevant communication to take place and reduce our 20 year dependency on email!

However remember, as one presenter at these years LawTech Futures said “If a community doesn’t communicate well at the moment, they won’t start to communicate just because you give them a wiki, blog etc”

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General Legal IT, WorkSite Tips & Tricks

Watch out, watch out, InboxFiler is about! – explaining a gotcha in WorkSite Send & File

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Send & File is a fantastic way to get email into your HP Autonomy iManage WorkSite DMS (Document Management System) – surely that brand name needs condensing!! But there is one small issue with Send & File that can crop up and bite you and that is the efficiency of the InboxFiler. Let me explain with a scenario:

John sends a email to his team about a project and uses Send and File to file that email to the project workspace. Each of the team (Sarah, Joe and Lisa) receive the email, Worksite nicely dedupes the emails in the workspace. All good so far.

Sarah then forwards on the email to a colleague, lets say with a legitimate question on the project. Because the email still has the “luggage tag” ie that part of the subject that looks like [TEST-LIB1.FID1234] when Fred receives the email the InboxFiler files it in the project workspace. Meaning John could still read this email in the workspace. Still OK as that email was related to the project and thus the project workspace holds a record of all communications on the project.

However, Fred thinks the question was a bit stupid and forwards on the email to Claire. In the email he writes a little note about how much of an idiot he thinks John is along with a few other choice words. In a normal email conversation John would never know. BUT in this example Fred left the “luggage tag” in the subject line, as soon as Claire receives it the InboxFiler picks it up and files in in the project workspace! John (who has full access to the project workspace) can therefore read this email, oops!

Thankfully in later versions of the WorkSite HP Autonomy allowed things to be configured to strip out the luggage tag if you chose “Send Only” on the send and file pop up. But if your version is not yet configured this way (How would you know? Try doing a “Send Only” to yourself and see if the “luggage tag” is still in the subject line) then be careful. You can also just remove the “luggage tag” by deleting it in the subject if you are making comments that are no longer relevant to the original subject, this will stop it being filed by the recipient automatically!

As a slight aside, I recently discovered Vine from Twitter. A rather neat App available on only the iOS platform at the moment. It allows you to record small video files and share them, a bit like Instagram for video really. Anyway whilst playing around with it I decided to knock up a short video of the above Send and File scenario, you can view it here.

 

For more info on Send & File see this previous post.

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General Legal IT, Legal

Tomorrow’s Lawyers – still waiting for tomorrow!

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This last week I’ve just started reading “Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future” by Richard Susskind. It’ll take me a while as I tend to have a few books on the go at once and this one will only get a look in on my commute in between reading the Metro and re-watching the WestWing on my phone! But as I’ve just finished part one I thought I’d write up some thoughts.

For those that are unfamiliar with Richard Susskinds works, he basically points to radical changes in the legal market and has been future gazing in this way for some years. In fact I recently bought his 1996 book “The Future of Law” off eBay, this was the year I started in Legal IT and I’m intrigued to look back to what he predicted then and compare it to the journey I’ve been through within Legal IT over the last 17 years, but that’s a post for another day.

The first part of this latest book really sets the scene of what is to come in the later two parts. The first five chapters that make up part one are as follows:

  • Three drivers of change
  • Strategies for success
  • Commoditizing the law
  • Working differently
  • Disruptive legal technologies

The “three drivers of change” are the drive to cut costs, the changing legal model (ABS etc) and IT. It’s hard to argue against any of these, it’s just what will be the rate of change and how big a change will it be. The second chapter I thought was very interesting, low costs and alternative fees were discussed as “no brainers” and the chapter moved to how firms will need to work very differently. The final three chapters expand on what he sees as the options; to build an efficiency and collaboration strategy, the only viable strategies that he sees for law firms to remain competitive.

It’s interesting reading the first part how far from this vision a lot of law firms are, seemingly concentrating on cost cutting and alternative fees alone as they strive to keep profits high (example, “Eversheds set to cut up to 166 jobs in latest redundancy round“).

Although I don’t necessarily agree with everything Richard Susskind predicts for law firms, I do agree that the winds of change are blowing through the industry. And the more stories like the front page on today’s Metro paper (see below) hit the mainstream media, the more outsiders will see a huge opportunity to deliver legal services in new, customer benefiting ways!

Metro Front Page - Thu 28 Feb 2013
Metro Front Page – Thu 28 Feb 2013
Click picture to enlarge

 Metro newspaper

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General Legal IT

BigHand user conference 2013 – Manchester

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Last Wednesday (13th Feb) I attended the Bighand user conference in Manchester. First off a big hand for Bighand, finally a vendor puts in a lot of effort to hold a quality user conference outside of London and well done to the firms that turned out and made it a successful event!

I like the Bighand events, they have a good mix of general business/legal keynotes, product information and specific breakout sessions. It’s like what Interwoven used to do with their Gear Up conferences, but sadly no longer do under either their Autonomy or HP guises.

The keynotes on Wednesday were from Dame Sarah Storey and Neil Rose (Legal Futures). Dame Sarah’s talk was about her journey as an athlete which was fascinating, a Paralympic who’s won gold medals in two sports. Neil had to follow with a talk on ABS’s (Alternative Business Structure) which wasn’t quite the talk of an olympic athlete but was a great introduction to ABS’s in the legal world. One point I noted mid talk was when he was discussing a firm in Silicon Valley that offered advice in a relaxed coffee shop atmosphere, lawyers like “Apple genius'” in the jumpers with the firms logo on. It caused a chuckle in the audience which to me shows how far the UK has to go to rid itself of its stuffy suited image and really embrace new business models.

Next up was the product information and below I’ve written up the key product take aways that I noted:

First off were some mobile offerings:

FreeMe was a dictation app for iPads, built from the ground up rather than a port of the iPhone app. As well as the obvious dictation functionality it allowed iPad “open in” functionality from emails that then open the attachment in FreeMe for review with dictation controls on screen, to allow you to dictation notes to send back to BigHand.

Then it was the turn of their new BlackBerry 10 App. When this was announced I thought it was an odd launch. After all BigHand hadn’t launched a Windows Phone 8 App yet, a platform that was released some months ago. “But it’s a small market share” I hear you say, very true but the BBX platform has zero market share at the moment. My guess is RIM (or BlackBerry as I guess we should call them now) encouraged enterprise app developers to produce BBX apps for launch, something Microsoft really should have done! But it’s all a moot point as it was mentioned that a Windows Phone 8 app is in the pipeline from Bighand.

Next up was some info on Bighand 4.4 for the desktop:

Here we have some nice integration with Lync to show presence information when sending dictations. Handy if you need to ensure you send to someone who is available.

For the speech recognition module there were a couple of new wizards demoed. One that helps you to set the optimal recording levels for your microphone and another for training your voice to the system.

Last up was some work Bighand are doing on workflow. Integrating WorkSite and Speech Recognition into one workflow. You right click in FileSite, select dictate, it auto profiles the dictation with data from WorkSite and then once you finish the dictation and document are linked together for future reference. It’s a shame I didn’t photo the slide as it shows it much better than I can describe it (maybe if someone from Bighand is reading this they can send me on the slide?).

The afternoon was set aside for the BigHand breakout sessions. I attended a couple, one on speech recognition for which Charles Christian tweeted a nice summary “is speech recognition a marmite technology – some love it & some hate it“. Then one on mobile device management, led by MobileIron. The take away here was that BigHand are developing their mobile apps against MobileIron’s app management API’s to allow you to manage and control their app using the popular MobileIron platform. I hope they will also look at the Citrix app management platform next and provide a BigHand mdx for use in the Citrix platform!

Overall a good day. Thankfully my exit from the conference was timed perfectly as I missed the spectacle of Big Mills in lycra at the very end!

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General Legal IT, WorkSite Tips & Tricks

MCC : No not Marylebone Cricket Club, Matter Centric Collaboration!

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A Matter Centric Document Management System or MCC (apparently the other ‘C’ is for collaboration, who knew!) isn’t it all a bit old hat? I see the ILTA competitions still and wonder who isn’t doing MCC now?

I think maybe this is a US v UK thing? Maybe having using Legal IT for longer and in particular Document Management Systems (DMS) the US have lived in a profile driven DMS world for a long time and thus “searching” is more the norm, whereas in the UK we came to the DMS party late and are more tuned to browsing through folders. Therefore maybe for this side of the pond the concept of MCC made sense and we adopted it like ducks to water?

Either way though a few conversations and emails recently made me think that maybe some best practice is worth revisiting as the volumes of documents on matters increase.

To start with its worth stating something I’ve said before, Simplicity Rules! If you’re moving to MCC then I strongly suggest you start simple, there will be enough challenges to get lawyers to file documents and emails without making a hugely complex structure for them (nor is it worth getting bogged down in endless meetings to try and reach a decision on such a complex structure! What will suit Litigation will annoy Corporate etc)

But, it is worth planning in a degree of flexibility. We started with 4 or 5 “top level folders” and restricted the creation of additional top level folders to “Matter Administrators”, these were a small number of admins within the business who could control the folder structures for their depts. matters. Thus we aimed to keep a level of control and consistency. Other approaches I have seen have been to allow a specific set of additional folders to be added to matters, ie to open up the creation process to a wider audience but restrict what can be created.

When coming up with your short list think retrieval, make it obvious where things are. Correspondence, Bills etc. These can each be tagged with meta data in most DMS and so the documents placed in them will inherit this information making searching easier. The tricky issue is the Miscellaneous folder or Other documents, there are pros and cons to this which I’ll leave to you all to discuss in the comments!

To me though, documents is easy. We’ve tied a lot of our filing into the template system now. So if you create a letter it will automatically try and file this to the Correspondence folder for you. The tricky part is email!

How do you file these? Technically they are correspondence, but combining into a single document/email folder will unleash a whole heap of trouble. Just don’t! So a separate email folder is the best option, but then some matters can have thousands of emails and if you’re a “browser” this can be a nightmare. This is where you probably want to think about some best practice rather than create a default structure. You could get people to create sub folders by date, fee earner etc

Overall though MCC is not just about the folder design, care needs to be taken in training and instilling best practice. Also you won’t get it right first time, you’ll look back a few years later and wish you’d done things differently. But then it’s worth diving in as you’ll only learn this through observing and getting feedback from real world use!

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