Category Archives: General Legal IT

General Legal IT

Office 15 (aka Office 2013) – Microsoft go tablet and cloud in a big way

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I took a look yesterday at Steve Balmers keynote as Microsoft took the wraps off the newest version of Office software: Office 15 or Office 2013. I’m sure I’ll blog a bit more about it over the next few months, but here are a few bullet points of my first thoughts.

  • It’s clearly designed for the tablet (but don’t worry the desktop version there too). Some of the limitations I’ve had with my iPad and Office documents (clunky cut and paste, formatting etc with fingers) have been looked at and I like the idea of the radial menu (see screenshot below) as a concept for menu selection using fingers.
Office 15 – radial menu
  • Word : I love the integration with SkyDrive (SkyDrive is the default, not the C drive). It’s kind of like the Kindle Whispersync concept for books of different devices. So edit a document on PC, open it on your tablet and you can jump to the same place you were at on the PC.
  • Word : All your settings, templates and recent documents etc follow you from device to device too. It’s a bit like roaming profiles for the consumer space.
  • PowerPoint : The presenter view for tablets looks excellent. See your current slide, notes, next slide, a timer etc on your tablet. Whilst at the same time the tablet is displaying the presentation view on a main monitor. Apparently Apple’s KeyNote has this, well kudos for Microsoft for seeing the greate features in Apple’s products and “borrowing” them!
  • Excel : There were some key “wizard” features (you can see towards the later parts of the keynote) which shortcut some complex tasks. Nothing revolutionary, but pretty neat (Flash Fill, Suggestions for visuals).
  • Word : Track changes has been tweaked so that unless you’re actively reading through changes and comments, all the noise simply shows up as a bunch of red lines. Just click the line to expand the thread. So after a back-and-forth with say a client, the comments will appear in a single conversation that flows alongside the page, in the margins. Previous versions you’d see a separate comment bubble for each person’s response, even if they were all addressing the same issue.
  • Word : You can edit PDFs!! Let me say that again, not only create PDFs but you can edit PDFs in Word!

There’s plenty more and I’ve added a few links below in case you want to read up on more. One thing that was hinted at in the keynote that may be useful for Legal IT vendors is that you can run “Apps” in Office, so in the keynote they show some Apps in Outlook. Now these could be the answer to deeper, more usable integration for things like HP Autonomy iManage’s FileSite and Workshare’s Protect, for example. Clearly Microsoft are really on a roll with their Metro interface and readying Office for the world where we switch between desktop, tablet and smartphone devices, I like what I see with Office 15. But for it to be successful in Legal IT the vendors need to integrate their apps well and I mean really well! The Email Management Module of your DMS (Document Management System) needs to flow and work in Outlook 15 whether on a tablet or a desktop, I need to see the DMS integrate with Word like I see SkyDrive integrate with Word 15. I think some vendors need to be radical with this version of Office and break backwards compatibility of their products with previous versions of Office to really push the integration to the next level.

It’ll also be interesting to see what the corporate version of Office 15 is like, I hope it isn’t hampered by the lake of SkyDrive etc (will SharePoint be the corporate SkyDrive?)

Links:

Great review of Office 15 on Engadget : http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/16/microsoft-office-15-preview/

Some more screenshots on Mashable : http://mashable.com/2012/07/16/microsoft-office-15-review/

Microsoft Office 15 site : http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/officepreview

Keynote : http://mashable.com/2012/07/16/microsoft-takes-the-wraps-off-office-15-watch-live/

 

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General Legal IT

Simple, obvious and exactly what the lawyer ordered. Legal IT software shocker!

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It’s taken me a while to write this up but a number of weeks back I saw a product demoed, that for the first time in ages had me thinking “Yes!”. Actually I originally saw this product months before at Tikit’s Word Excellence day, Jan Durant was demoing it and saying how fantastic it was, but at that point I didn’t see what the fuss was about. But in the recent demo I did, the idea is simple if not a bit boring, but it just seems exactly right!

The product is gDoc Binder and it is just that, a document binder. You select a number of electronic documents, put them in an electronic binder and that’s it. See told you it was simple and boring!

But the things that excite are as follows:

  • Each document can be linked to an original in SharePoint, a DMS, a File Server etc. Each time you “sync” the binder the latest version of the document is collated into it. So you’ve always got the latest document.
  • It works like a paper binder, flicking through pages is easy. You can tab sections, add bookmarks, post notes etc
  • You can add web pages, so a lawyer can take a snap shot from the firms intranet. A page of directions from the client web site etc
  • You can take the binder with you on an iPad. And this is where the real “Yes!” comes from. The complaints we get against e-filing rather than paper filing is the lawyer can’t flick through documents/emails whilst on the phone or with the client to find the right information or communication, they can’t read through them easily on the train/plane etc, they can’t make notes. Well the binder on an iPad they can, pretty much like it were a real binder!

This simple product may be a huge lever to allow law firms to shift from paper to electronic for the vast majority of documents. I’m not naive enough to think we’ll get to the full paperless office, but it could allow us to rid ourselves of a huge chunk of that paper (and gain the cost savings that go with all that paper, ink, printing and storage).

From what I understand the product isn’t available direct from Global Graphics but will be resold by others (who can add connectors etc for the linked of documents to, say, a legal DMS), they include at least a couple of Legal IT vendors as far as I’m aware. It’s definitely worth a look.

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General Legal IT, Legal

LawTech Futures 2012 – UK’s answer to the annual ILTA event?

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Well it’s a couple of weeks now since LawTechFutures 2012 and I have to say it was a good event for Legal IT in the UK. I’ve not been to a any general Legal IT events in the UK for a number of years. I’ve been to some good specific events (Interwoven’s old Gear Up events were usually very good and Tikit’s Word Excellence days have been good too), but the old Legal IT shows were more “trade shows” that allowed vendors to show and talk about their wares. They certainly weren’t the kind of show that allowed you to both see products and also hear about key topics affecting the industry. I attended ILTA in 2010 and there was an example of how good a Legal IT event can be!

So what about LawTechFutures? Well it isn’t quite ILTA yet, but it’s certainly a great start in the right direction (it is after all only lawtechfutures event number one!). A few more tracks of speakers with better platforms for those tracks off the main track (the lounge and demo stages weren’t perfect for either speaker or audience really) and it could be an excellent regular annual event. This is just a minor point though and should not detract from the fact that the event was a huge success both in numbers attending and the quality.

For a good write up of the event have a read at the post on the excellent “The Time Blawg”.

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General Legal IT

Been gone for a while….

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I realised I haven’t blogged for a while. Reason is that as well as the rather hectic home and work life, I’ve a few other Legal IT projects on the go. First up I’ve been working on an article for “Managing Partner” magazine. I finished writing this at the weekend, so hopefully it will see publication in one of the upcoming issues. The topic is on WorkSite in a law firm, looking at the challenges of running a WorkSite setup, lessons learnt etc. The article is from experience of using WorkSite but would really apply to any legal DMS. The author terms means I can’t publish on here just yet, but will be able to in the future so if you can’t get hold of a copy I’ll post on here eventually.

Next up is a talk I’ll be doing at LawTech Futures 2012 in March on mobile technology (smartphones and tablets mainly) in law firms. Rather than a product review, it’ll be more on how lawyers can and do use them and where the tech is going that will be useful to lawyers. I’m talking at 13:40, so if you’re at the conference come and say hello!

And finally I’ve been asked to speak to the British Columbia Legal Management Association in Canada. This one is still in planning stages, but looks like will now be scheduled in May. Unfortunately this is a webex and telcon talk rather than a visit to Vancouver. But the topic on Technology – what’s new? should allow for a pretty interesting subject.

More regular blogging will resume once I’ve finished up the slides for my talk for LawTech Futures which from the email I’ve just received as a very strict deadline…..

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General Legal IT

ABS on ABS (or another blummin’ story on alternative business structures!)

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The move in the legal world to alternative business structures has generated a great deal of interest over the past few years. For a while it’s seemed a lot of talk and little action, but it now seems there are some interesting developments happening. Following Irwin Mitchell, Hill Dickinson and Kennedys are the latest UK Top 50 to confirm plans to move to ABS. And then this week Australia’s Slater & Gordon, the world’s first publicly listed law firm, moves for Russell Jones & Walker.

I’ve been a little sceptical of how revolutionary “Tesco Law” will be. Sure I can see it in the personal injury and clinical negligence arena, for example, where there is a lot of standardised legal work. But outside that, I’m not sure. For existing businesses I can’t see beyond the move being like an IPO for the partners, what’s the incentive to grow that business after the “float”? Most entrepreneurs after an IPO of their business leave with their money and start again. In a law firm though the product of the business is the lawyer (unless it’s standardised legal work where processes and standard documents have been be created, but then we’re back to my first point!).

However, I read with interest the story of Liverpool’s Silverbeck Rymer which is set to be acquired by software and outsourcing firm Quindell Portfolio. As a Legal IT professional this move kind of excites me, a company with the technology and the processes taking over a law firm to get the legal expertise? The business process and IT systems being front and centre in building and growing that business!

The other interesting possible development could be for new entrants to gain the access to capital from investors. This could allow those partners from big firms to setup new firms or maybe entrepreneurs who see the opportunities that then work with some young lawyers to build the next generation of law firm?

It’s an interesting time to be in legal and could lead to some very exciting opportunities in legal IT. Maybe I’ll try and persuade a couple of friends who work in the IT dept of one of the aforementioned UK Top 50 to guest blog post in a years time on what changes ABS has brought to their dept!

 

If you want some further reading on “Tesco Law” there’s a good in depth commentary on Legal Week entitled “Reverberations and revolutions – change grips the market as ‘Tesco law’ finally launches”

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General Legal IT

Top 5 Legal IT technologies of 2012

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I did my review yesterday so let’s crack on and look at what I think will be emerging technology for Legal in 2012 or that will be technology that will feature heavily in Legal in 2012.

Speech Recognition : Yes I know I predicted this in 2010 but I really think we will start to see more uptake of this technology in Legal. It’ll creep more into consumer and as such we’ll become more acustomed to speaking to machines. Read more of my thoughts on speech recognition in this post from November last year.

Windows Phone/Android/iPhone : Or more to the point, the death of the blackberry in Legal. After years of being the corporate tool of choice (remember when having a BB was a bit of a status symbol!!), RIM through major failure of service and also taking their eye off what they were really good at (email access) have gone the way of the fax machine. As for the replacement? Well the last two on the list are obvious, but I’m sticking my neck on the line and predicting the order as written! I’ll post up why I think this in an future post.

SharePoint : Now this is a tricky one. I’m going to sit on the fence for a little longer here as to which way it will go, but in 2012 I think we’ll conclude one way or the other whether or not SharePoint will or will not become a viable Legal DMS (Document Management System).

The return of the laptop/netbook : not that they ever really went away. I read a great post before Christmas that really chimed, it was entitled “If you want to look old, get an iPad”. I gauged my 9 year old’s opinion as to which tech he’d prefer, answer a laptop. Apparently roblox doesn’t work on an iPad! Seriously though, the iPad is nice kit and until I upgraded my Smartphone from Windows Mobile (old version) I hankered after one. But now, I’m with Larry’s 27 year old son (albeit a bit older!) I think they will have a place but for me a lightweight ultrathin laptop would be preferable and I think more will start to feel the same.

A new vendor emerging as a major Legal IT player : to me the market is ripe for a new Legal focussed player to emerge. I’m not sure where, but there seem to be plenty of opportunities for technology focus in Legal that aren’t being addressed or existing technology that is perhaps being forgotten as the traditional players diversify into other verticals. Now vendors don’t go spamming my comments with products, as I won’t allow them through! But feel free to let us know why you think this might be you without product placement.

That’s my top 5, nothing revolutionary for this year (although predicting Wp7 as a major player could be seen as beyond revolutionary!). There are things from the last few years that will continue in 2012, Office 2010 becoming the default platform and IM continuing to proliferate around Legal. But these feel more business as usual now. So, I’ve kept it fairly generic and it is probably geared more at mid sized firms and above. But would love to hear your comments on the above or what you think will be big in 2012 (especially from those in smaller firms).

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General Legal IT

Top 5 Legal IT technologies – a two year review

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Before I take my annual look of emerging technology for Legal in 2012 or technology that will feature heavily in Legal in 2012, let’s review what I thought would be key things over the last couple of years.

My 2010 list was as follows:

  • Mobile Applications
  • Search
  • Office 2010/Windows 7
  • Instant Messaging
  • Speech Recognition

And then in 2011 was:

  • Glue Tech
  • Microsoft Lync
  • YouTube
  • Mobile Applications
  • Office 2010 and Windows 7

Now given the similarity between the lists it’s clear that things don’t move at a fast pace across the whole of Legal. But I didn’t do a bad job (alright some were bleeding obvious, but they still caught some Legal IT vendors on the back foot. Office 2010 anyone?)

Off the mark! OK YouTube hasn’t been the success I thought, but elsewhere it’s going where I thought it would (see YouTube in Schools), it makes sense to me and so maybe soon we’ll see something appear. Maybe one of the Legal IT vendors (HP Autonomy hint hint) could provide a YouTube channel with product videos (like WorkSite how-tos for example!!). Glue Tech is one to watch still, there is use of this technology of course, but I thought there would be a real rush to this last year. Speech Recognition I think I was a couple of years too early and Search, well let’s put that down as a bad idea!

Mobile Apps,  well the apps themselves haven’t really been making waves in Legal as I thought . Sure there are a few Legal specific ones out there, but I was thinking more of an internal Marketplace/Appstore for firms own apps. But there certainly is a move by lawyers to more personal/consumer devices (iOS, Android, WP7) and away from the controlled blackberry environment which may speed this up over the next couple of years.

Microsoft Lync/IM, now this is taking off in firms. It feels to me like email circa 1995 at the moment, contacting someone in the firm is now easy but outside is still a bit tricky and clunky. I’m sure we’re almost at a tiping point and corporate IM will explode like email did in the late 90’s.

Office 2010/Windows 7, come on who hasn’t implemented something or at least started a project to implement these two? For UK firms it was obvious this was going to happen, almost all of us were Office 2003 and XP and so it was bound to happen. Why then were so many Legal IT vendors caught out and behind the release of Office 2010? I could fill a blog post with the problems we found along the way, mainly with plug-ins to Office from 3rd parties causing issues!

Tomorrow I’ll take a look at 2012!

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General Legal IT

“Siri, will speech recognition ever take off in Legal?”

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Last week I attended the Bighand user conference at the excellent Renaissance Hotel in St Pancras (take note certain legal IT company whose only user event I attended the previous week). Rather than write up a review of the whole day (there’s a good one here if you’re interested) I thought I’d comment on an item that was high on the days agenda.

Speech Recognition.

Now before I get accused of following certain people or the current trend generated by SIRI let me first point out item #1 on this blog post of mine from the 1st January 2010!

But the feeling I got from the conference is that finally the tech, that has been around in Legal ever since I’ve been in this vertical, is finally reaching a point that it is useable. The latest version of the Bighand product (4.2) uses the new Nuance 11 engine and from the demo shown on the day is impressive (demo online too). The workflow with transcribe and proofing seems ideal and the tools given to the secretary to control the dictation playback with the resulting document for amendment is well thought out. I seem to recall in a previous Bighand session that this correcting by the secretary would help with the teaching of the speech recognition software for that author (I could be wrong on this one so check with Bighand first!)

With a bit of work with the API that Bighand now provide you could create a great Fee Earner interface from the DMS (document management system) that would ensure the document being created is started on the correct template, filed in the right place and transcribed ready for a secretary to finish the document.

There were some good case studies from law firms who had started to use speech recognition. Stating that the transition wasn’t difficult for existing Bighand users, but the lawyer had to want to embrace the technology (due to the initial time taken to teach the system and perhaps having to adapt dictation style for better results). Also feedback was not that this led to reduction in secretaries (those lawyer-secretary ratios were high enough already!) but to enabling the secretaries to do other work for the lawyer.

The key point that stood out from the day though were some comments generally on the technology. For a while I’ve thought that maybe dictation was a dying technology, after all the “younger” lawyer is used to typing his/her own documents right? Well this generation maybe, but the next generation is growing up with the likes of SIRI. Maybe this generation is a blip before lawyers throw themselves back at dictation and with the advances in the technology maybe speech recognition is now a viable solution to both improve efficiencies and to make those straining lawyer-secretary ratios work!

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General Legal IT

WorkSite 9

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Vote for me in the Computer Weekly Social Media Awards 2011

I’d very high hopes for WorkSite 9. Admittedly a lot of these hopes I’d developed circa version 8.2 (i.e. before the Autonomy merger) so a lot has happened since. But because of this I feel just a little underwhelmed by what’s in v9.0.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is some good stuff in 9.0 that is going to be really useful for a lot of firms, but there were a couple of things that I’d hoped for that haven’t materialised. First off though let’s take a look at the things that are there:

Unicode: Now if you are a one country, one language firm that has no international offices nor international clients then this probably isn’t a big deal. But for everyone else it’s a big cheer of “Yes! finally”, no more agonising over the code pages of libraries and limiting the poor folks in the small office in Russia to using the Latin character set for everything! There’s the ability to handle the meta data of course, but also to handle dialogues in multiple languages based on the locale that Windows is set to.

Security: Two areas of security jump out:

  • Security in the ACL (Access Control List) currently uses an optimistic model (or can be set at the server for an all pessimistic model). i.e. the higher or the lower security always wins if the person is in the ACL more than once (e.g. marked as an individual as well as in a group). In 9 you can have a hybrid model, where no access trumps everything. Basically no mimicking the way Windows file security works.
  • Encryption. file encryption built in. So you can set specific documents to be encrypted at the file store level. In law firms I can see this being an increasing requirement in the near future!

Remote use:

  • https support: an alternative access to having to set up VPN connections to gain remote access to your firms WorkSite setup. Similar to Outlook where you can set the client up to talk to Exchange via https enabling easier remote access.
  • The other is not necessarily designed for remote access but will be beneficial for those on slow connections. It’s the utilisation of OffSite cache whilst you are online. So if there is a local version of the document that is the most recent, then that is used rather than fetching one from the server. Reducing network traffic (at least for large document transfer).

Client:

  • 9 has features for saving native word comparisons into WorkSite and to allow you to compare WorkSite documents
  • Integrated into the save as PDF functions in Office, allowing you to save to worksite (interesting these two seem to be an “attack” on Workshare, Docscorp & Litera territory!)
  • In Office 2010 you can now view NRL link attachments within email (similar to standard Office attachments)
  • Add-on available that plugs into the Outlook 2010 social connector that can show WorkSite activities.
  • iPad client v2 – take a look at this post on Legal IT Professionals for full details.

Some additional features that help IT department more than the fee earner are:

  • Easier desktop upgrades through automatic upgrade of custom configurations, handling re-install in the install package.
  • FilesSite and EMM will become one package.
  • v9 server compatibility with 8.5 schema to ease upgrades.
  • Autonomy Control Centre – Allows managing of all IDOL components. Includes graceful start-up and shutdown, ability to edit config files etc. In future sounds like there are plans to include all WorkSite components in this!
  • IPv6 support.

Finally there is a push to the cloud, where you can have Autonomy host the WorkSite infrastructure. There is also a hybrid cloud solution. Where your data centre would replicate to their cloud for disaster recovery purposes or just for backup purposes. Uses replication products from Autonomy’s recent iron mountain acquisition.

So what were those two things that I would have liked to be in v9.0 that weren’t?

I was hoping for a significant rework of the database schema. Something that would really remove any limitations on docmaster in terms of number of documents and give significant performance gains to workspace/folder navigation. Also an addition of a much more flexible custom field set up, allowing full user configuration of meta data.

The second area I was hoping for work on was to allow easier global working. We know latency is a killer for any global set up, so I wasn’t expecting the Chicago guys to perform miracles. But just add more flexibility to allow “on the fly” connections to other libraries. For example, I could create matter shortcuts to an Australia matter in the library in Sydney from within my UK system and the DMS servers would then manage the connection only on my entering that particular matter (releasing it once I navigated away). This would save me having to maintain a connection to the Australia DMS as well as my UK one. DocAuto have a product that does something along these lines, but can’t help feeling it should be in the core product?

I did say my hopes were high didn’t I!

But what we do have with v9 is a good step forward. Plus as they will be targeting Office 2007 and 2010 only, it will hopefully mean we see some further exploitation of Office 2010’s features and better integration as we move forward through 9.1, 9,2 etc. as well.

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