Category Archives: Legal

General Legal IT, Legal

Lawyers need to understand the web and media (aka web 2.0 and new media)

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Did you see the #trafigura storm on twitter yesterday? It was down to the “Guardian gagged” story in the press (Go over the editors blog post for a good synopsis of what went on or if you want a shorter version take a look at Peninsulawyer’s post)

Now I’m not going to get into political commentary (if you want to read the political blogosphere’s take on the story try Iain Dale or Guido Fawkes blogs) or touch on the legal ramifications, I wanted to do a quick post on it from a Legal IT point of view.

In fact one twitter post stood out for me yesterday and this kind of sums up my thoughts:

The Carter-Ruck/Guardian/Trafigura press censorship story is classic example of what happens when old time lawyers meet Web 2.0 media

It’s not about actually using web 2.0. I really don’t believe that every lawyer should have a blog, be on facebook or linked in, update twitter, use instant messaging (IM). To me these are all just tools, just as the old telephone is. In fact think about it, you wouldn’t evangelise about the telephone and how everyone really must use it would you? People either use it or they don’t. The key point is that they know what it is and what it is useful for (and as important what it’s useless for).

The same goes with blogs, micro blogs, wikis, social networking, IM etc. Lawyers need to know what it is, how it is used and how it is now mainstream (don’t believe me? Read “Youth can’t live without web” and “Finland makes broadband legal right“). If they choose to use it great, but it doesn’t matter as long as they know and understand what it is.

And this is where I believe Legal IT departments can help.

I remember, back in the late 90’s when the Internet was still fairly new, doing a series of presentations with a colleague around our firms UK offices. The aim was to talk to lawyers about the technology behind the web. This was mainly for technology and media lawyers, but it was giving them an insight into the technologies that their clients would be talking about. This is what law firm IT people need to be doing now. Not necessarily advocating they use it, but talking to lawyers and helping them to understand the web 2.0 technologies, how they are used and in this case how it is impossible to “gag” a story anymore (the “Streisand effect”).

Final thought, the term “web 2.0” or “new media”. Is it me or does this seem really dated? Surely it’s just “web” and “media” now?

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Legal

Flexitime? It’s about time!

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I’m a strong advocate of Flexitime, I used to work in an environment where it was available and I still miss the benefits ten years on. For an employee it is a great way to get that work life balance as well as generally making you feel more productive (you put in the hours when your work demands it rather than just when the clock tells you to).

I see from today’s Legal Week that Allen & Overy are looking at an initiative to bring in flexible working. Now whether this is a true move to flexitime for all staff (including support staff),  just general flexibility for partners or meeting the 2003 legislation for parents you can’t really tell from the article. But the fact it’s in the press to me shows at least law firms are starting to think about it.

Looking at Legal IT in particular, what are the benefits of flexitime? As well as the afore mentioned obvious benefits to the employee it also has benefits for the employer.

Key at the moment are the cost savings you could get immediately by extending the core hours:

Say your current hours are a usual 9 to 5. To get staff to work long after 5 you’ll either have to have very well motivated willing staff or more likely you’ll have to pay overtime.

In a flexitime environment you could extend core hours to 6 to 8 (staff chose which 7/7.5 to work in this time), staff know that if at busy periods they work a 10 hour+ day they will be able to work shorter days when it isn’t busy. The employer gets the savings in reduced overtime pay.

Another benefit of the extended core hours is you widen your coverage in the day for customers as some will rather come in early and some will rather stay late.

Productivity usually increases as people maximise the work when it is required. They will put in the effort to reach milestones, get pieces of work done etc as they know that in the lulls they can claw the time back.

Personally I think the UK has an unhealthy focus on just the hours you’re in the office. These being more important than the work you do in those hours. Two stories stick in my mind regarding this:

  • First was from a friend of mine who went to work in Germany, he told me the story of a British manager who had gone to work for the same company. The manager did the usual British thing of staying in the office late, after a few weeks his boss had pulled him to one side and told him if he couldn’t do the work in the hours allotted he clearly wasn’t the man for the job.
  • The second I heard was of a manager who spoke up when challenged by the boss on the reasons why there was no one in the office late. Clearly this was an indicator that the dept needed to be busier. The manager responded by asking whether he (the boss) wanted an office where people came in and simply sat at their desks from 7 to 7 or where people were in (maybe for less time) but got the job done?

Yes there are times when extra hours are needed to get jobs done, but as I’ve pointed out flexitime helps this by allowing employees to be somewhere else when there isn’t the demand. Most employees when they feel they are being looked after will give a lot in return.

Have a look at this great post by Adrian Dayton that highlights the generational difficulties in adapting from the old way to the flexible way.

Will it happen in Legal? I recall when I first started in a law firm, the working week for support staff was 37.5 hours, thanks to competition in the London firms support staff (secretaries at the time) this was reduced to 35 hours to keep the good people. If more city firms look at flexitime then it could ripple through the top 200 fairly quickly!

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Legal

Consolidation within the UK 200?

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I caught this article from the Times today about regional law firms (“Regional law firms take severe steps to cut costs”). The main angle of the article is nothing new to those in the legal world, another round of cost-cutting measures, shorter working weeks, sabbaticals, secondments, salary freezes etc. It focussed on regional firms or probably more specifically the mid sized UK firms (as someone pointed out in the comments Pinsents aren’t what you would call a non-London/regional firm).

I looked at this in context of an article I posted a link to on twitter yesterday “Overworked corporate counsel cut back on use of outside firms”.

Then thought to myself: Is there going to be enough legal work to go around?

I mean if the work has dried up to such an extent, are firms wise gambling that levels of work will pick up to pre 2008 levels?

What if the corporate counsel continues with the primary firms and never goes back to using larger numbers of firms? What if the general drive to keep costs low in business continues and puts pressure on law firms? And then it is highly likely we will have a change in government in the UK , one that will maybe reverse the current situation where the solution to all problems is more laws and legislation being introduced, easing the red tape on business.

The question then becomes: Will we simply have too many law firms for the work out there?

I’m guessing therefore that we will start to see a fair bit of consolidation in the legal industry in the coming years.

A series of mergers outside the top 20? Perhaps it wouldn’t interest the magic circle but maybe others in the Top 20 will refocus back on the UK and absorb some of the mid range players? I just can’t see there being the number of firms there are now around the £150m revenue mark and so I’m guessing 2010 will be a bumper year for mergers leading to a whole range on new brands in “The Lawyer UK 200 – 2010”.

I predicted Clarke and Haddin would go early on Monday this week and England would wrap up the Lord’s test early afternoon, will this be another case of a great prediction or will it be a Tony Meehan (Decca) moment? Time will tell.

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General Legal IT, Legal

CRM system + Email Marketing + Twitter?

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Forget twitter it’s back to email marketing? Well maybe not, but a couple of things this week reminded me that email marketing is still useful and it is still used a lot.

First off was a post I caught on Larry Bodine’s blog entitled “Forget Twitter, Go Back to Email Marketing”. Now I don’t necessarily agree with the title, but there is a point in the article that I do agree with. The fact that “There is limitless opportunity for real interaction with your customers sitting right there in your email database” i.e. start using email better to interact rather than just ‘tell people’ and the fact that in most law firms CRM systems I bet there isn’t one twitter username, but there will be hundreds of email addresses.

Second was that I attended the inaugural user group for the Tikit eMarketing product yesterday (this is basically a bolt on to InterAction that manages email marketing activity) and I was surprised at the turn out. It shows that email marketing is still big for law firms.

So does the Tikit product address the direction of the blog post? i.e. the ability to react and engage with those you are mailing?

The upcoming release (v4.6) looks promising.

As well as consolidating the user interfaces of the current version and improving the technical side. There are changes proposed to enhance the reporting to generate metrics from multiple mailings and compare. So you can start to see what content is relevant to which clients. All this can be linked back to InterAction data to categorise by contact types, folders etc

These changes are setting the platform to build on the product in 2010 to allow enhanced process flows and multiple page events (allowing choices to be made by the recipient and different content delivered). There are also plans to enhance the ability for fee earners to deliver dynamic content to clients simply through the InterAction interface. There was also a session at the end on Spam. And this is the difficulty in trying to get personal in email marketing, especially if you go down the articles path of emails from partners addresses rather than “noreply@bigcompany.com”. Last thing you want is a badly formed email broadcast resulting in the partners email address being added to a spam list!

Email marketing though is still widely used and is definitely here to stay for a while, products like this are allowing you to make it more individual and relevant by track the metrics and allowing dynamic personalised content.

I did ask the “Twitter” question to the product team in a coffee break and although it isn’t planned I did get the impression that discussions about it had taken place internally. But the feeling they had was one I can see, how would you integrate twitter campaigns into CRM systems? I had an initial think on the way back and came up with:

  • You could broadcast links to content and track clickthru’s, can’t really see real benefits of that as you could gain this from web stats.
  • If twitter usernames were collected in the CRM system then you could @ or direct message your customers?
  • Maybe you could add to the first point a tracking of RT’s of your articles and collate this information as to which twitter users are interested in what content?

But I concluded that I’m still not sure twitter is tuned to traditional eMarketing, it’s less a centralised marketing function and more an individual tool. I’m sure though there is some way to link the two, but haven’t thought of it yet. Any ideas?

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Legal

UK big law partner caught blogging

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Let me guess you clicked on that link for the same reason you might click on a sports link of “Ryan Giggs signs for Liverpool” or a politics link of “Gordon Brown resigns”, it seems so unlikely that you have to find out more.

Blogging is old hat, the term was first coined back in 1997. However this doesn’t mean they are obsolete by any means, in that time they have grown to the position where they are starting to really challenge television and newspapers when it comes to breaking and shaping news stories.

In the US blogs have been used widely in business for a number of years and with great effectiveness in politics. In the UK there are some great blogs out there and bloggers (especially political bloggers) appear regularly on the 24 hour news channels now. However I would argue that blogs really haven’t hit the mainstream in business and certainly not in UK law.

There are some UK legal bloggers out there, but your average big law partner isn’t blogging. It’s probably a similar argument that a certain MP for Salford used “I’m not against new media. YouTube if you want to. But it’s no substitute for knocking on doors or setting up a stall in the town centre”, this may be true but why not use both?

So to all the lawyers, what’s stopping you?

And if your IT dept hasn’t given you the software or shown you how here are some resources:-

What is a blog? Watch this video “Blogs in Plain English”

How do I start? Start by setting up a blog on WordPress.com or Blogger.com

That’s pretty much all you need.

So go on give it a try I’m sure your clients would appreciate hearing from what you have to say, you never know it may also lead to some business coming your way!

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Legal

Free! Why £0.00 Is the Future of Business

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I caught sight of this article “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business” in The Spectator. It suggests a new business model where the product is free, the consumer gets the product for nothing and the business makes its money elsewhere. This is especially prevalent online where the thought of paying for things you would in the “real world” are, well, crazy (would you pay to read your quality daily newspaper online? conversely would you expect the paper copy of your quality daily newspaper free?).

The Spectator points out that the business model isn’t necessarily that new, but what is new is it’s less a marketing trick to get your product out there but a new economy, in the words of the Wired article :

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

In the UK an ISP revolutionised the market in the early days of the internet boom. Traditionally (before broadband) you would pay a monthly fee for your ISP and then your phone calls on top of that. Freeserve came on the market and dispensed with the monthly charge, making its money from a proportion of the call charge. Within a year it had grown to 1.5m subscribers and changed the market forever.

So my question is can this business model be translated to legal work?

From a consumer point of view I remember buying my first house in 1995 and getting the conveyancing for nothing (thanks to the builder).

But could a law firm really offer services for nothing?

Could we every get to the point that the knowledge systems in law firms become so good that a simple search could trawl thousands of precedents and cases in a firms KM (Knowledge Management) and DM (Document Management) systems and bring you back the agreements that could be used with virtually no partner/associate billable time. Meaning very low costs that could be covered elsewhere (e.g. by adverts)?

I imagine the response now is “Don’t be stupid!” but then I’m sure if I stood in “Our Price” or “HMV” music stores 20 years ago and said “in the future you’ll be able to get every record and tape in this store in far better audio quality, for free!”

I’d had said the same thing back then “Don’t be stupid!”. And now we have Spotify!

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General IT, Legal

Let’s all pick on twitter

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OK the new kid on the block has grown fast, 974% last year apparently! Everyone’s talking about it, in the legal world it’s on every conference agenda. It’s big news.

So it comes as a shock when people question its value. And judging by recent articles and posts on the web the time is ripe to try and knock twitter from its podium:

And thus it get’s articles written about it, repeated and quoted in blogs and twitter itself (yes I understand the irony!)

To me though people are missing the point, twitter isn’t facebook or myspace so comparisons with them doesn’t work.  It is just a brand for micro blogging (there are plenty of others out there: kwippy, plurk, jaiku, identica etc). Yes, twitter as a brand may fail but micro blogging is here to stay.

Face-to-face, letters, telephone, fax, email, instant messaging (IM) and twitter (micro blogging)

They’re just all just forms of communication, nothing more nothing less. People will prefer one over the other, over a period of time one form may get used much more than others. But none of them are going away.

IM has been around for years, but it’s only just starting to move into the business world (outside IT depts). But in a short time it will take off in businesses and we’ll see email usage fall away, just as we saw the use of telephones fall once email exploded on the scene (don’t believe it, just ask any 16 year old how much they use email!).

Micro blogging will start to appear too in corporate environments as people experiment with laconi.ca and jaiku.

My guess though is that Larry Bodine doesn’t necessarily think twitter is a waste of time, he’s in marketing and one sure fire way to get your name out there is to shout the opposite to what everyone else is shouting (after all it was only 5 months ago that “Twitter is valuable to legal professionals”) . And everyone has taken notice, I bet Larry has more speaking engagements and requests for articles than at any time in the last 12 months!

He may actually be right on twitter not being an effective law firm marketing tool, but as for being “sucked into the black hole of buzz about twitter” it isn’t a black hole, twitter or micro blogging will be just like the telephone here to stay for a long time!

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Legal

The billable hour isn’t going anywhere!

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@taxgirl on twitter “If I read one more piece about "demise of the billable hour," I’ll scream. BigLaw is reactionary, sure, but I don’t expect dramatic shift.”

That tweet the other day made me smile as I’ve been thinking of doing a post on “billable hour”, I mean it’s a written rule for a legal blog right? But I couldn’t quite get my thoughts straight on it, something didn’t quite fit. I mean are the clients of law firms really crying out for fixed fee’s or do they just want lower fees? Or are they even crying out at all? And if they aren’t then why would a business radically change a model that has generated it lots of money?

Also it’s not that new, some work has already shifted to fixed fee or pre-packaged work. Firms like Optima Legal have business models built like this. But will biglaw step into this arena in a big way or just leave it to the niche production line firms?

I’m going out on a limb and guessing nothings going to change anytime soon and the billable hour model is here to stay for the majority of medium and large firms.

I know this goes against a lot of legal bloggers, but it was an example I was trying to pull together for an argument for abolishing the billable hour that drew me to this opposing conclusion. Let me give you the example, I was thinking of when you service your car (or any garage visit).

Say you’ve a VW Passat standard model nothing fancy. There are thousands of this model on the road. It’s a 40,000 mile service and the garage you are taking it to has done this service hundreds of times, and if it’s a VW dealer then most likely on this very model. The cost is estimated at about £170. But it’ll depend on what needs doing.

At 5pm you pick up the car and get the bill:-

  • 67GDHS67- Oil Filter x 1 – £40
  • 888GH28 – Aero wiper blades – £10
  • 89897DH – Duckhams Hypergrade – £35
  • Replace oil filter (1hr) – £20
  • Replace wiper blades (.5hr) – £5
  • Oil replacement (2hr) – £40
  • Check brake fluid – £20
  • Check timing belt – £25
  • Miscellaneous service labour (2hr) – £40
  • Total service cost – £235

The next day someone else will take their Passat into the same garage and will get charged just £170 for the service as it didn’t need any extra work.

As a client of the garage do I want them to charge me a flat rate? Do I want to know exactly how much it will cost?

My immediate answer is yes of course, but then I think about it more and start to change my mind. In fact I conclude, no not really. I started to think that for the garage to charge a flat rate they’d have to manage the service a bit like a project, they’d break it down into components, estimate risks of extra work and add float for these possible risks. Basically if I was the guy who paid £170, I would probably pay a flat fee of £190 to ensure that everyone’s bill was also £190 (the garage moving some of the costs of the possible extra work around).

As the other guy, having had years of experiencing how the garage used to charge, I wouldn’t be too happy with this new model. In that I’d effectively paying for all the other people’s extra work.

There’s always the “project tensions” to consider when working to fixed price. When you try to bundle up a piece of work (or project) it requires you to manage the three tensions: Time, Cost and Quality. Time in most cases would be critical to ensure customer service and to manage the throughput of work in the garage, therefore if the flat fee is fixed and too low to cover the work then naturally your quality will drop. Customers aren’t going to be too happy about this.

So after some thought on this example, I thought “you know, if I was a law firm client I think I would want to see the full breakdown and I think I’d accept sometimes I’d pay that bit extra on difficult jobs to get my work on time and of a consistent high quality.”

So if the client isn’t too concerned about changing the model, what about from a lawyers perspective? The recent AmLaw 100 stats show that although the PPP (Profits per Partner) has dropped in this recession the average is still over $1m. So is the crunch so bad that radical changes will be in order? I don’t think so.

And that draws me to my conclusion stated earlier, the billable hour is here to stay!

BUT, what I do think will change is that law firms will look at the hours billed and see how internally they can gain more profit from each task on a case. Are there tasks that can be done more cheaply? Using junior members of the team, outsourcing some work, using technology better etc? Can they ensure that all the time is billed and not missed.

Also from a clients perspective. If I think back to the garage example, I too would be looking at the hours billed and thinking. Why can’t that be sourced cheaper, why is that dealer charging X for labour and this one charging Y. In the legal world the client relationship should mean the client can start to encourage better/cheaper ways.

But all this requires the visibility of a breakdown of the bill, not an overall flat fee!

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General Legal IT, Legal

From Novell and Word Perfect to global data centres – law firm IT : a history

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There was a blog post doing the rounds over Easter via twitter about a law firms marketing dept that asked an employee to stop re-tweeting the firms twitter posts made me think twice about writing a post on the brief history of our IT dept. But then I give our marketing team a bit more credit than that, so here goes. A blog post whose sole purpose is just for a bit of light end of week reading.

I include the name the firm as it really doesn’t take more than a few clicks to work out which law firm I work for. And so before you read on you might also want to read my disclaimer, especially if you’re a lawyer just so you’re under no illusions that this is some kind of official blog post 🙂

The IT dept as it stands now had its genesis back in the city of Bradford in West Yorkshire. It was housed in a lovely 1960’s office block (see photos below), a building called Arndale House. At the time the firm was known as Dibb Lupton Broomhead and was still very much a Yorkshire firm rather than the global organisation it is now. At that time there was also an IT presence in the main Sheffield office (a team looking after the network and a couple of Unix boxes, the helpdesk, the training team and the IT director), however it was the smaller team based in Bradford which was the start of what would become the global IT dept (the Bradford team quickly grew in those early days from 3 to approximately 9 people – 5 of whom still work for the firm).

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At the time the firm was on a Novell network with the main desktop application being Word Perfect and it only had internal email (although an external AOL account was available from one IT machine!!).

The Bradford team was crammed into 3 small rooms, sharing the floor with the old DMRU teams, before growing slowly to take some open plan space outside these rooms and finally relocating to take half of the floor when it brought in some infrastructure teams and application support (all that was left in Sheffield was the help desk by this time and the firm had merged with Alsop Wilkinson to become the the burgundy national firm Dibb Lupton Alsop)

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At this point external email was up and running, Windows 2000 had replaced Novell, the firms intranet was in place (together with a flickering candle for the ‘I’ of iSIS at Christmas time! It was after all when animated GIF’s ruled the web!) and some thoughts on a matter centric DMS for the firm were starting to emerge (if you worked in the the dept at that time then do you remember 80/20? The ideas from which generated the firms home grown matter centric DMS years before WorkSite 8).

Growth for the dept mirrored the firm and by Y2K it had re-camped again to take an entire floor, two below its previous home in Arndale House. A large open plan aircraft hanger of an office now housed all the IT dept (helpdesk, business systems development, technical development and support teams for applications and infrastructure).

There was a relocation of many of the servers running the IT services from Sheffield to two rows of racks in a nice new server room on the same floor as the dept (apart from the dodgy air conditioning which required portable units to be introduced on many occasions. In fact dodgy air conditioning seems to be a recurring theme in all the offices the dept has been located!)

DLA-blue-squareBy 2001 the firm had become the blue squared DLA and the IT dept had relocated from Bradford to Leeds, this would enable it to continue to grow to meet the needs of the growing firm and for it to be closer to the firms offices in Leeds centre which were a much larger part of the firm than the operation in Bradford. Park Row House in Leeds centre was the new home (see photos below).

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It was the first time the dept had had meeting rooms, build and test rooms as well as a purpose built test server set up. The time at Park Row introduced many of the key cornerstones of the firms current environment. It also saw the firm start to grow its international IT hubs to support the non-UK offices.

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The switch from rounded DLA through DLA Piper Rudnick  Gray Cary to DLA Piper saw the IT dept out grow Park Row House and move to its present location in Leeds. The main IT dept is still located here but it now has key regional teams in Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Moscow, Vienna and Dubai, as well as a number of IT personal in most offices for local support and training.

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Legal

Last time it was manufacturing, this time it’s white collars turn!

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Almost every day on twitter or in the legal press there are stories of law firms cutting lawyers and/or staff. As I write this post according to The Lawyer the total UK legal redundancies stand at 2727. In fact it may be easier to reel off a list of those firms that haven’t yet made layoffs (note I say yet, I would bet that layoffs are being considered across all firms)

So is this recession worse than 1980’s? Are companies really in bad shape?

I read an article recently on two types of recession:

  • “boring recession” – troughs in the business cycle e.g. 1989-1992
  • “dramatic recession” – big transformations in the economy. e.g. 1980-1982

The article above points out that the early eighties recession stripped out much outdated manufacturing, mining etc. The recession forcing the market to do exactly what markets do and correct itself.

So what category is this recession? Boring or Dramatic? I’m going to take a guess at dramatic, but this time it’s not blue collar industries that the market is correcting, but white collar ones!

This is the reason we’re seeing so many law firms shedding jobs. Though it’ll probably take more than this wave of layoffs to “correct the market”. I don’t think we’ll see another wave of redundancies, as I think a lot of firms will have stripped out the numbers they can afford to lose without compromising the organisations. What I do think though is that we’ll start to see radical changes in law firms; new billing models, exploitation of technology (to take a quote “no longer need clerks and pupils to search libraries, copy forms and wrap bundles in pink ribbon”), commoditisation of legal work etc.

But I think the biggest impact we’ll see though is in the upturn. This time there are many more well educated, ambitious, highly talented people that have been made redundant. Some of these will “rebel” against the old way of doing law, they’ll not go back to working for one of the old firms and they’ll start new firms. There was a wave of small business entrepreneurs that came out of the last dramatic recession, this time those entrepreneurs could end up completely reshaping delivery of legal services. (it may not take the upturn to bring this about, I saw an article today which shows this could be already starting to happen!)

It’ll be interesting to see how the current Lawyer UK 100 and AmLaw 100 keep up! Who’ll do a Microsoft and shift like they did when they turned 180 degree and embraced the internet and who will be the Lotus sitting back complaining that that upstart Microsoft didn’t do things their way and took their business away?

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