Well it was only a few days ago that I re-iterated my prediction that BBX would be a flop and that the BlackBerry would fade away in Legal IT. For me a big part of this were the rumours that the first devices would be touchscreen, to me this removed the whole raison d’être for a BlackBerry, the hard keyboard. I mean if you want a touchscreen smartphone then why oh why would you go BlackBerry? (Think Playbook, everyone asked the same question re: tablets and went and bought iPads!)
If RIM release this as the first BBX device at the end of January then I have to say that the BlackBerry may still have a place in law firms. Having a good keyboard device would be a great reason to stick with the OS, a lot of lawyers use the BB as their primary email device and love the physical keyboard.
I still think it would be a pair of NHS spectacles (see my Top 5 for 2013 for the explanation!), albeit now they’d be a rather good pair and ones that a fair few people would actual be more than happy to wear!
Well it’s that time of year again, a time when TV is full of reviews of 2012. Also a time when blogs review predictions from last year and look forward to 2013 in a hope that they can look back next year and say “I told you so”! Who am I to buck the trend, so let’s take a look at what I had last year as key Legal IT technologies in 2012:
First I had was Speech Recognition. Well to be honest Siri continues to be a gimmick and this technology in Legal still isn’t making the significant inroads I thought it might. I am still convinced it will make waves in law firms for a couple of reasons. One, in an age where law firms need to keep costs low this technology will surely prevail and two, technology firms are all continuing to push the boundaries of what this technology can do. But it does look like this is going to be a very slow burner.
Next were a couple of technologies where I was way off, first was SharePoint which kind of fizzled away as a hot topic in 2012 and then I madly suggested a big return of the laptop/netbook! Oh how wrong was I? On the former I’m now happy to admit that I just don’t think SharePoint will be a major player in Legal IT as a document management system. As to the latter, well that really was my my “Decca moment“. I ended up buying an iPad and realised the netbook was dead!
The final two predictions for 2012 are still wait and see, a new vendor emerging as a major Legal IT player and the death of the blackberry. I still think the market is ripe for a new player in Legal IT, I’m not sure exactly what this will be though yet. But I’m not convinced it will be a “disruptive tech” company, I’m thinking it will be a company that delivers something law firms already do, just in a much better way. As for the blackberry it’s wait and see, personally I think BBX will be too late to the market and if those first devices are purely touchscreen that’ll be game over!
2013
So what about 2013, well I think the death of the BlackBerry is still in the mix. If I’m being more specific I think it will be BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) that will be it’s end and as such it will probably be a slow demise as law firms take time to extract the BlackBerry from their estates. To use an analogy of spectacles from my school days, the BB will end up being the NHS specs for the law firm, handed out to those who aren’t fussed about tech or as temporary replacements for the lost or broken iPhones!
Which brings me onto BYOD, it’s been talked about throughout 2012 but this year it will become reality and lead to a real look at data security. It’s time to make the shift from securing the hardware to securing the data on it. Moving the passwords down from the devices to the apps. Stop the focus on locking down hardware and move to facilitating secure use of data on any device. In Legal IT we’d better prepare to enable this as our lawyers are going to bring in their iPads and use them regardless.
Next I think bespoke systems (or at least flexible systems) will start to make a come back. Remember Hatton Blue anyone? The modern versions of this and the rise of ABS law firms will see firms look at their processes and find more efficient ways to do things. This will be much more than case management software, more a mix of case management, online communication and document automation.
Cloud storage I think will be a big topic still through 2013. In particular for Legal IT it will be a specific cloud offering that will be all the rage, a simple dropbox or skydrive type solution. In this area in Legal there are two big players that already have their hat in the ring. Workshare’s SkyDox and HP Autonomy’s LinkSite, at the moment I think the later just has the edge. But there are also smaller vendors offering integration of your DMS into products like box.net. I’ll put up a blog post about this in the coming weeks.
And finally that big one, Windows 8 makes it to the top of my top 5 for 2013. Sure no law firm will run a desktop refresh with Windows 8, but all those replacement laptops and desktops at home WILL come with Windows 8. People will use it and (eventually) start to realise the potential, software vendors will write for it and the hybrid laptop/tablets will start to become the big BYOD item of 2013. Law firms by the end of the year will need to cater for Windows 8 whether they like it or not!
So that’s it my top 5 for 2013.
5 – Death of the BlackBerry, rise of the other three (iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8) in law firms
4 – BYOD
3 – Bespoke systems (Q: are they still 4GL’s??) make a comeback
This is a bit of a departure from my usual posts, but please read on! It’s more a cry for help or advice in the Legal IT world (in fact anywhere in the IT world).
In South Korea there is a proprietary word processing (WP) application called Hangul which is published by the company Hancom Inc. This WP application produces documents in its own file format (with a .hwp extension). The latest versions of Hangul can save documents in .doc format, but Microsoft Office cannot open .hwp files.
Now for international firms this becomes tricky as .hwp has widespread use in South Korea (particularly in the government), meaning difficulties when sharing, filing, collaborating on documents with the rest of the world which is wedded to Microsoft’s file formats!
So I’m asking if people can share this post as widely as possible. Email colleagues, put it on linked in, tweet it out, facebook it etc. Someone out there must be working in this dual world and have some tips and tricks they can share. So if you’re one of those people please use the contact form on this site to get in touch, contact me via twitter @planty or simply respond in the comments of this post.
Yesterday I listened in on what I’m sure is a fairly new idea in Legal IT, a panel discussion on a conference call! Sounds odd when you put it like that but that’s effectively what it was.
Christy Burke to Moderate Vigorous Discussion on December 11th between Noted Global Industry Experts, Event Free to the Legal Community.
So what was it like? Well it wasn’t quite the vigorous showdown at dawn, but it was an interesting discussion. And moreover it was a concept I really hope continues. The format like I say was like a panel discussion and could be a perfect host to a number of Legal IT topics. It was at a suitable time to catch UK and US callers and short enough to be able to listen along to whilst working.
Back in April 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.
This isn’t an article evangelising SharePoint as the next Legal Document Management System (DMS). Nor is it an article focussing on which DMS you should choose (be it HP Autonomy’s WorkSite, NetDocuments or OpenText)
No, the intention here is to look at the operational issues and challenges in running a DMS in Legal. It is written from experience of HP Autonomy’s WorkSite product, but don’t let that put you off if you use another DMS. A lot of the experiences, lessons and benefits could apply to any of the four listed above.
Key challenges to address in the DMS world
The challenges found when using a WorkSite DMS can be broadly placed into two categories. Those that are purely technical in nature and those that are related to end user usage.
The WorkSite application servers are the “hub” of the DMS and are fairly simple to maintain and monitor. From the technical view we have rarely experienced issues with these. We’ve switched from physical to virtual servers without difficulty and because more can be added as the business grows, they have proved fairly trouble free.
Sizing the other parts of the system for your firm is one of the biggest challenges. Examples of the issues we’ve encountered are problems because our database was not sufficiently powerful and in later years because our index servers were not sized correctly. The WorkSite application utilises SQL queries to work out and display your workspaces, folder structures and document content. This can be quite “chatty”, and ensuring your SQL Server can handle the transaction volumes for the size of firm and size of document database is key to a performant system. Processor power and RAM are the key variables here and if possible size the latter to be big enough to keep your databases in memory, this saves having to keep those database indexes constantly “tuned” to maintain a consistent performance. The indexer has become more an integral part of WorkSite with the IDOL engine from Autonomy integrated. As early adopters we found setting this environment up quite a challenge. Now Autonomy support provide recommendations based on specific details of your proposed platform and usage. However time taken with design of the IDOL environment will pay dividends over time.
Another challenge we have had as a firm is distance. One limitation of WorkSite is the distance of your end user to your WorkSite infrastructure, the further you (the end user) are from the servers the slower WorkSite will perform. Latency at work! (to be fair to HP Autonomy this is the case for most software!). There are a couple of technologies that can help here. Firstly HP Autonomy provide their own product to help in the “WorkSite cache server”: this is pretty much a WorkSite application server located nearer the end-user that caches documents locally; it takes away some of the “traffic” from the end-user PC to WorkSite servers, thus improving performance. The other option is to use network optimisers (or WAN accelerators). In our experience the later simplify your WorkSite environment and work very well, but this may not be the case in every environment.
Aside from the technical there are the challenges of the end user. Introducing a DMS is a big business change and this shouldn’t be underestimated. A DMS is a very structured way of filing electronic information and is never going to be as quick and easy as saving to the hard drive of a laptop. Managing this change is one of the key ingredients to success of the system.
Also once you introduce a DMS, from a lawyer’s point of view the whole of their Microsoft Office environment becomes the DMS. And from an IT point of view this can be problematic: there can be many pieces of software that all interact with Word and Outlook and getting them all to work correctly is one of the biggest challenges when upgrading.
Any tips for how to meet some of these challenges?
So what advice would I suggest to a firm embarking on introducing a DMS? And how can you address some of the challenges? I’ve broken this down into four sections:
1. Don’t skimp on the hardware!
This was alluded to when discussing the SQL Server and Index servers. Within WorkSite these are the key components to giving good performance, the rest you can scale out later e.g. by adding another application server. So take your time, work with an IT partner who can help with the sizing (or get access to Autonomy’s support site and take some time to read their guides on sizing).
Understand your likely growth, both in terms of year on year document growth and how you expect to grow as a firm. Project this information forward a number of years to get the storage size you will need, then add a bit! Also ensure you understand limitations in your hardware. You don’t want to fill that 1Tb disk only to find you can only increase the capacity by replacing hardware because the server you bought can’t handle larger drives.
What do you need in terms of resilience for the firm? Is redundancy in one environment acceptable? Do you want a hot standby disaster recovery site or do you want a full duplicate business continuity site? Each costs more than the previous, but build the best you can for what you need for your firm (talk to the lawyers to understand how the firm would cope without the DMS for periods of time).
2.Expect a trough of disillusionment after the business change
based on Gartner’s hype cycle concept
I find that Gartner’s hype cycle diagram is a great representation of the peaks and troughs of user experience when introducing a DMS. It helps to understand that you will hit a “trough of disillusionment” and prepares you to set off with the expectation that end users won’t understand or accept it immediately. This isn’t a smartphone app that is intuitive and can be picked up in no time without any training. Not only is there a big technical change, there is often a shift in how the business manages files, documents and emails. Plan for as much training is realistic; add earlier sessions a few weeks before with more of a presentation style in order to set the scene, and then do follow up training a few weeks after go-live. Effectively communicate and train the key objectives and the change as much as possible.
3. Understand your environment
Plan for the full lifecycle of your documents: understand how you’ll age your files, how you’ll retire them from your DMS to an archive, how you’ll delete files. This will usually be done in conjunction with infrastructure capacity management, but what we’re talking about here is the business view of archiving and storage not the technical. So think at what point a matter workspace will go from your live library to an archive; what will happen to it then etc?
Unicode: if you have overseas offices (particularly in places where the Latin character set isn’t the norm e.g. Russia, China) then you’ll want to watch for “Unicode”. It’s a bit complicated to go into the technical detail of ascii, Unicode, codepages etc here, but in terms of WorkSite just remember you WILL need to consider character sets if you plan to use version 8.x.
Business first: finally when planning your environment, firstly look at what you want from your business before considering the technical limitations. This will avoid setting up libraries for individual offices/countries because of latency issues when the business requirement is for the DMS to bring sharing of documents across all offices.
4. Get a partner
I’ve mentioned IT partners briefly already, but they are worth mentioning in their own right. It really is a benefit to work with a partner when implementing and running a DMS. Firms like Tikit and Phoenix will ensure you get what you need from the DMS. But as well as thinking about the implementation also think about the on-going support relationship; understand how knowledgeable their support team is as well as their pre-sales team and maybe even get them involved in the implementation project if possible.
What’s the impact and what ROI could you expect when using a DMS?
Our objectives in implementing WorkSite to replace an existing DMS were to gain:
– Full version control
– Email management/filing capabilities
– Storage of documents other than Word, Excel
– Integration with other legal applications (e.g. document comparison)
– Allow expansion (global)
It is easy to see that WorkSite (or any of the other DMS listed at the start of this article) fulfilled our objectives. However as the business changes so do the requirements and we’ve had a number of additional objectives to address based on the requirements of the business. The biggest has been dealing with the explosion of email. To illustrate this here are some rough stats on document numbers in just one of our libraries: in 2004 we had approximately two million documents with a negligible amount of email on the electronic matter files. We now have approximately twenty million “documents” in that library and over 80% of these are email.
The ability to serve a global firm is now taken for granted; the thought that 6 years ago lawyers in each office had great difficulty sharing a matter file with each other without having to email documents back and forth is a little hard to believe now.
These all are obvious benefits realised, however it is hard to measure a return on investment in terms of £’s. A lot of what a DMS brings is allowing end users to manage a good e-file. However if this is achieved, then cost savings can be made in the saving of paper and printing costs incurred in maintaining paper files (plus the subsequent storage of those files). Of course the truly paperless office is a bit of a myth, but a serious reduction can be achieved. And most people would be staggered by the costs incurred in this area alone in law firms!
Future challenges
So what are the key challenges for a mature DMS implementation? These will always change, but right now there are three looming large.
ILM (information life cycle management): how to control and manage the growing volume of documents/emails from creation to destruction. Planning this from day one would be a huge benefit (and a lesson learnt from hindsight!). Control can be achieved though, through use of tools like HP Autonomy’s workspace archive manager (WAM) which can move complete matter files from one library (database) to another (e.g. from a live library to an archive), maintaining meta data (like document number or document history). These archive libraries can then be moved to cheaper storage, separate archive DMS’s (which can have less resilience than the live environment where close to 100% up time is essential), backups and eventually retired completely if required.
Email: the growth is staggering and although the rate of this growth may be plateauing, even at the current rate it creates a very large volume of data to handle. Add to this the increasing number of devices emails can be created and consumed on and control can be a nightmare. I’ve seen lawyers with inboxes of 50,000 items: how on earth do you start to sort that into organised matter files? HP Autonomy have introduced the WorkSite Communications Server in recent releases that links the email and the DMS together at a server level. This allows a better experience to the user through functions like “filing folders” and “send & file”. But I can’t help think though that further work needs to be done by all DMS vendors in this area and leverage the storage that email systems are already using.
Consumerisation of IT: as the smartphone and tablet take off, then the demand for ease of use in the desktop increases, as does the demand for applications to use documents/emails from the DMS on the personal portable devices. HP Autonomy does provide an iPad application and I’ve seen impressive beta’s from companies like Prosperoware which take things one step further by adding your inbox so that you can manage all your emails on the move in one App whether in the DMS or not.
Summing up
The main piece of advice I would give if you’re starting on the journey is to both seek out an IT partner and also to speak to other firms and learn from their hindsight. These will really help with your planning. Also realise it’s a never ending journey!
A DMS is the bread and butter of a law firm. As such it is often taken for granted and seen as an “old technology”. But the demands of a law firm change over time as does the IT that is used to access the data. The challenge for the DMS is to keep up with these and ensure managing the electronic matter file is as simple, easy and efficient for the lawyer as possible.
I wonder if there are some of the big ILTA parties on Wednesday evening? It does seem somewhat like perfect planning that all my recommended session picks for Thursday start in the afternoon!
Day Four (Thursday 30th August) sessions
Going Mobile with WorkSite Mobility (Thursday 2pm, Hashtag #AUT2) 7pm UK time
I wonder if there are some new developments in WorkSite Mobility? I watched an interesting session on ILTA TV online yesterday where a law firm was discussing the benefits of the Netdocuments mobile offering, in that they expose a webdav interface so that iPad apps like iAnnotate can access the DMS directly. Be interested to see what HP Autonomy are doing in this space.
The Mobile OS Platform Roundup (Thursday 2pm, Hashtag #CTPG5) 7pm UK time
What I’m interested to hear from this one is whether the twitter view of BlackBerry’s in law firms is the reality. I know I’ve been a proponent of “BlackBerry is dead” online postings, but when you really look at it from an old school lawyers point of view, one who just wants email and a physical keyboard, is there anything else out there? Also is Mobile Device Management for other devices ready for a large scale implementation yet? It does feel we’re almost, but not quite there and it’ll be perhaps 1-2 years before the RIM death knell sounds. Wonder what the session concludes?
Top Technology Issues for Law Firm CIOs in 2012 (Thursday 2pm, Hashtag #TECH9) 7pm UK time
BYOD? Email Management (general storage management in fact)? What else is on the radar?
The Future of Data Delivery or: How I Learned to Stop Browsing and Love the App (Thursday 3:30pm, Hashtag #APP13) 8:30pm UK time
Should We Build an App for That? (Thursday 3:30pm, Hashtag #THO4) 8:30pm UK time
With Windows 8 on the horizon with its Marketplace, are we in Legal IT ready for the shift to Apps? Or will HTML5 keep us all in the browser? Or worse will we continue with our fat clients (that’s the PC client, not the one that pays your bills!) Should be two interesting sessions discussing “appification” of Legal IT.
The Virtual Desktop As a Mobile Solution: Is the Mobile Desktop Ready? (Thursday 3:30pm, Hashtag #CTPG6) 8:30pm UK time
I remember Larry Ellison talking about the network computer back in the mid-90s, there was a guy who had vision way beyond Mr Jobs! Here we are today talking about essentially what he was advocating nearly 20 years ago. Will be interesting to hear from firms who have gone virtual desktop internally (replacing the desktop in the office) rather that just mobile. Also how people are coping when the “desktop” goes offline.
Ramifications of Commingling Personal and Professional Data (Thursday 3:30pm, Hashtag #INFO11) 8:30pm UK time
Apparently “Commingling” literally means “mixing together”, I did not know that! But this is a key issue that is raised as a real risk by many clients and auditors. The demand that we as law firms separate corporate and personal data, but how do you do that? Will be watching this hashtag to find out!
—
So that’s it for ILTA 2012 and my posts. There have been some good sessions by the look of it, I’ve been a bit disappointed in the quantity of tweets on some of the hashtags this year. But there have been some good blog posts from the conference and the ILTA TV live streams were very good. Maybe in future ILTA needs to really encourage bloggers to get posting and generate more online buzz?
Office 2010 and Windows 7: One Year Later (Wednesday 11am, Hashtag #DASPG5) 4pm UK time
It seems that this year was the year of Office 2010 and Windows 7 (as predicted in my top 5 for 2011), we all stretched Windows XP and Office 2003 right to the very end. Or was it right to the point where Microsoft corrected the Vista mistake and completed development of Office (Office 2007 with the ribbon in some but not all apps anyone?).
For those yet to take the plunge, this looks like the perfect session where firms can tell their war stories so you can learn from them. For me I’ll be watching to see who took the docx route and learn whether they say this as a benefit or an extra pain in the rollout. Also be interested to hear in the session whether anyone on the cusp of a rollout has decided to wait for Windows 8 and Office 2013?
Tablets and Enterprise Content Management: The Tornado Strikes (Wednesday 11am, Hashtag #ECMPG1) 4pm UK time
I’m not in the slightest interested in the e-discovery angle of this session. But I am interested in how people have tackled the following “Tablets can also wreak havoc as users move and store content directly on the devices”. As the synopsis says “what policies and solutions have been developed to control enterprise content on tablets”. This is a real problem we’re tackling right now as I’m sure are plenty of others. The management of data and services on personal mobile devices is an emerging theme this year at ILTA from the look of the sessions, so it may be too early to get real war stories and solutions, but let’s watch the hashtag!
Play-Doh, Legos and Law Firms (Wednesday 11am, Hashtag #INFO7) 4pm UK time
First off I need to get something off my chest, the plural of Lego is Lego, it’s like Sheep! That feels better 🙂
I am really looking forward to reading the tweets from this session, the title has a real ring of TED about it (that’s www.ted.com not TED the movie!). The synopsis is equally intriguing, with the starting sentence “If you could build a law firm from scratch”. Will the session live up? I hope so.
An Email Archiving Nightmare: There Is No Magic Fairy Dust (Wednesday 11am, Hashtag #TECH7) 4pm UK time
The New Wave of Email Management (Not the Same Old Fruitcake) (Wednesday 3:30pm, Hashtag #ECMPG3) 8:30pm UK time
Unless the volumes of email start to drop off, I am coming round to resigning myself to the point made in the synopsis for the first session, “Email storage needs are growing and its unrealistic to make attorneys move email messages into a DMS”. However I don’t agree that keeping it all in a big archive bucket with retention policies is the answer either, after all there are valid reasons why a team in a law firm would want all their electronic document and email under one matter, the electronic file.
So I’m hoping the second session in particular will suggest some real alternatives, I’ve a few ideas myself but I don’t think anyone is doing them yet.
ILTA TV PANEL “Is It Time To Move the DMS To The Cloud?” (Wednesday 1:20pm, Hashtag #ILTATV3) 6:20pm UK time
The battle of the big three, apparently this ILTA TV slot will have OpenText, HP Autonomy and Netdocuments discussing this question. Should be interesting!
Social Media and KM: What Can Your Organization Learn from the U.S. Military and Intelligence Services? (Wednesday 1:30pm, Hashtag #INFO8) 6:30pm UK time
If there is one session that should light up the hashtag, this is it. Looking forward to seeing whether this session can prove that you can get the key messages from a session across online.
Desktop Globalization: We’re Not in Kansas Anymore, Toto! (Wednesday 1:30pm, Hashtag #APP9) 6:30pm UK time
And finally on Wednesday there is a session where I have a fair bit of experience. However what interests me is that all the speakers are from US International Firms, in that the original origins of the firms stem from the US rather than the UK. So although I’m sure the challenges faced are very similar I’ll be interested to see whether the solutions are the same.
Continuing my daily look at tommorrows ILTA 2012 sessions from the other side of the pond. Here’s my pick of Tuesday’s sessions with a few comments.
Day Two (Tuesday 28th August) sessions
Make the Move: Autonomy’s Cloud for Information Management (Tuesday 11am, Hashtag #AUT1) 4pm UK time
This could be an interesting space in the next few years. Netdocuments had a bit of a head start with a DMS in the cloud, but HP Autonomy seem to be shifting into this space now. I can’t tell yet exactly how the Autonomy offering works, is it “hosted worksite” or something totally different? Also I can’t tell how wide the scope of this session is, will it include email archiving and/or consolidated archiving as well as the DMS offering?
Either way there are obstacles still to overcome regarding where you’re storing your client data, but once these are satisfied then the shift to cloud storage does seem attractive. Especially if the architecture behind is infinitely scalable. So be interested to watch this hashtag to see what comes out of the session.
Epona – DMSforLegal – Doc Management on SharePoint (Tuesday 11am, Hashtag #SPOT2) 4pm UK time
Ah SharePoint as a DMS. For big firms I think Clifford Chance have answered our questions. But for mid sized down Epona seem to be doing a good job in this space. I’m still sure that for all its clunkiness there is some room for SharePoint in the DMS space, especially with a light Legal skin over the top. It’s especially attractive for those using foundation (ie the freebie SharePoint bundled with Windows Server) to help reduce costs.
OneNote for All Your Notes: A Hands-On Session (Part One) (Tuesday 1:30pm, Hashtag #HAND4) 6:30pm UK time
OneNote for All Your Notes: A Hands-On Session (Part Two) (Tuesday 3:30pm, Hashtag #HAND4) 8:30pm UK time
Ah, my favourite piece of software in the last few years. I love OneNote! The ability to chop and change your notes in as flexible a way as the paper notepad has led me to ditch the paper and carry my laptop into meetings. Outside of work I’ve my Windows Phone, my iPad and my home PC all sync’ing the notebooks up to my SkyDrive. Take notes from anywhere, any device and consume them somewhere totally different!
We just need to start to exploit in the workplace now, shared notebooks across departments in law firms. I know our Australian IT team use OneNote to share information across the front line teams successfully. Imagine if a lawyer could have his OneNote on their iPad or Windows 8 surface sync’d to a the team back in the office. Be interesting to hear use cases from this session.
Kraft Kennedy: Benefits of Microsoft Exchange 2013 for Law Firms (Tuesday 1:30pm, Hashtag #SPOT3) 6:30pm UK time
I have to admit I know nothing about Exchange 2013 and what it brings, so I will take a look at this hashtag in the hope that people tweet the key benefits over Exchange 2010.
A Preparatory Guide to BYOD (Tuesday 1:30pm, Hashtag #TECH5) 6:30pm UK time
Mobile Access to Your DMS (Tuesday 3:30pm, Hashtag #CTPG3) 8:30pm UK time
BYOD (Bring your own device), I now see this as being two distinct areas. First “I want my desktop” and second “I want an app to do…”. The ability to bring in your own MacBook for the former and your Windows Phone for the latter. The iPad can cross either depending on how you want to use it.
The first instance I suspect most firms have done or are in the process of doing, it starts with remote access which is then only a step away from the ability to bring in your laptop to the office and access your firms desktop. The second though is a little more tricky, especially if you want the experience you get on your own iPhone (think GOOD vs access to your own Gmail on your smartphone, the former brings security but compromises the experience). It’s new and I suspect we won’t see really traction here until Windows Phone 8 and iOS6.
I hope the #TECH5 session is more about the “I want an app to do…” though and also that finally we have a really well though out secure app with great user experience in #CTPG3!
IT: Putting the “Person” Back into Personalized Service (Tuesday 3:30pm, Hashtag #APP7) 8:30pm UK time
I read a great post recently, that although about rip-off Britain, showed a great example how poor customer service can be when you don’t think like your customer and don’t understand what they are after from you (see this article and look for the discussion with CrossCountry rail!)
Be interested to see how others are looking to re-engage IT with their customers in law firms.
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?
Back in February 2011 I wrote a post titled “Is iManage WorkSite about to be outflanked?” where I looked at two up and coming DMS (Document Management System) technologies that were looking to take iManage WorkSite’s crown as the legal DMS of choice for mid to large law firms. After 18 months I though it would be worth taking a look to see how one of those “manoeuvres” is progressing.
The SharePoint offensive.
Leading the front is Magic Circle giant Clifford Chance, their drive started back in 2010 (at least that’s when I first heard of their plans to replace legacy DM5 systems with SharePoint at ILTA 2010 in Las Vegas). A post on Legal IT Professionals this month nicely brings us up to date on how it’s going and below are some of my comments on the progress.
My first concern for any big law firm thinking of SharePoint is the length of time taken to reach the objective. The project is getting on for two years old and so far only half the firm is live (3000 staff), as an example we have recently put nearly 1000 staff onto WorkSite in a project taking a little over 6 months (the main logistics of the rollout being the last 7 weeks of the 6 months where we also replaced the desktop estate too). Yes you could argue that any new technology brings delays, but you have to weigh those up against the benefits you’re going to get. One of the main benefits touted for SharePoint is the cost savings!
The biggest concern though for me, and I think should be for any firm, is the lack of email management. Managing the volumes of email today is much more critical to firms than just the documents of the firm. Keeping an up to date electronic file with todays mobile lawyers is an essential part of any DMS. Clifford Chance say “We are still deciding how best to present email content in SharePoint”, this is two years in! As Joanna puts it in the article “So basically you don’t have and will not have for the foreseeable future one folder or site-collection with all your matter related data including knowledge, email and related documents”.
Now an interesting point is raised here, “it is not totally clear to me that a single folder for everything is going to be what people actually want” says Clifford Chance. And I agree from a technical perspective, but from a lawyers point of view I think the feel of one place for all the matter material is essential. In fact I’m starting to think that maybe the DMS isn’t the right place for email, but that is for another day/post. Regardless you still want the UI (user interface) to present you a matter folder so from a user perspective you feel all your file is together.
On current progress in legal, SharePoint doesn’t look to me to be a threat to iManage anytime soon with these two issues. However there could be one secret weapon up Microsoft’s sleeve that may turn the tide.
Office 15.
As Clifford Chance point out “firms would gravitate towards SharePoint because it integrates with everything on the desktop” and this is the key point. The user experience is becoming key, the consumer UI that Apple brought us with the iPhone and iPad and now Micorsoft are bringing with Windows 8 mean people are demanding easy to use applications. The integration of Office 15 and SharePoint could be key, as Clifford Chance say “most people like the way SharePoint looks and the way it works. It is very similar to using a Microsoft desktop at home, and it is a lot easier than learning to use a piece of additional software that keeps popping up and getting in your way all the time!”.
On this current attack though I don’t think that iManage needs to worry about being outflanked. If costs are to be believed (“said that they invested over £1 million in consultancy”) then there are few firms that can afford the cost or the luxury of a two year project. But there is the question over iManage now it’s part of HP and how it will adapt in the next few years? The battlefield is about the change considerably with Windows 8, cloud and mobile computing and it’s going to take an entirely different set of equipment to cope!
A law blog written by someone from IT or an IT blog written by someone who works for a law firm
