Outlook 2010

May 13, 2010 Jason 2 Comments

Yesterday was the official launch of Office 2010 and it looks like this is the year of Office. And that’s Office from Microsoft not the “Open” kind as some people would have predicted.

A lot of law firms I guess thought about Office 2007, but due to one thing or another (one big one I guess being the recession) stuck with Office 2003. But now on the back of what will probably be a mass shift to Windows 7 it’ll be Office 2010 that joins the party (the show of hands in yesterday’s Workshare user group backs me up on this).

So over the next few months I’ll probably blog a fair bit about Office 2010, I’ll tag everything with Office2010 so just use the tag cloud to the right to retrieve all the posts.

This post though is just a quick look at two features in Outlook 2010 that I saw on a webcast before the launch yesterday. Both of which could benefit legal as both will help lawyers to tackle the deluge of email they receive.

First off the Outlook OST. Yes, the OST has been part of Outlook previously (basically if you run Outlook/Exchange in cached mode the OST is the local “database” that stores your local cache of email). Following on from improvements in 2007 SP1, this has been improved to ensure it is more performant with larger mailboxes. So that’s in terms of number of items you can have in folders before performance drops and also the size of the mailbox overall that Outlook can handle efficiently. Tied to Exchange 2010 this could be a real benefit in performance over Outlook 2003 in particular!
Next some of the email management features. Better management of email conversations, the ability to point at a conversation (or email thread) and quickly remove superfluous emails that don’t add to the conversation. Also a very powerful (or dangerous?!?!) feature to ignore further emails to the thread! Basically if you’re bored of a thread of emails you can click ignore and the thread and all future emails on that thread go into your deleted items.

I’m sure there are many more features that I’ll discover as I start to use Office 2010. In my next post though I’ll look at someways in which Workshare intend to leverage Office 2010.

General IT

It’s nearly time to vote – Election 2010 and IT

May 3, 2010 Jason Leave a comment

Given that in the UK this Thursday we will be going to the polls for our General Election, I thought I should do an election themed post. Having trawled through the manifestos of the three main parties I was intending to do a “BBC style” evenly balanced view on what the plans in the manifestos would mean to IT.

But then given that this is my own blog I thought no I’ll give you my thoughts and that means there will no doubt be some bias! After all the comments are open for you all to air your thoughts in return.

So here is my opinion on what the manifestos might mean to IT, feel free to disagree either in the comments or on May 6th 🙂

In the Liberal Democrats manifesto IT comes up as follows:

Better government IT procurement, investigating the potential of
different approaches such as cloud computing and open-source
software.

savings that can be made across government – such as on pay, public sector pensions, and IT provision

In Labours:

continuing to cut bureaucracy and inefficiency in procurement, IT and overtime

giving virtually every household in the country a broadband service of at least two megabits per second by 2012

priority in the expansion of student places will be given to …. , technology, engineering and mathematics degrees

We will scale down the NHS IT programme

And in the Conservatives:

a freeze on major new Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) spending

We need to boost enterprise and develop a low carbon,
hi-tech economy

We want Britain to become a European hub for hi-tech, digital and creative industries

Make Britain the leading hi-tech exporter in Europe (whole section of the manifesto)

An economy where Britain leads in science, technology and innovation

So if you remove each parties plans to cut IT costs in government (which to be honest is inevitable given our spend on debt interest alone is higher than our spend on schools!), what are you left with?

Well the Liberal Democrats have a admirable but somewhat woolly commitment to look at open source software and, er well that’s it. Labour promise to give all of us (although watch for that virtually comment!) 2Mb broadband and a more worthy commitment to technology degrees. Not much so far, so we’re left with the Conservatives to focus a whole section of their manifesto on growing the economy through the technology sector (Listen to the section here).

Clearly no one is going to base their vote solely on the IT sector, but in a display of complete and utter bias I say that Conservatives show a much more compelling view for the IT sector.

And in a final show of unbelievable political bias I leave you with this video, enjoy 😉

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z0PP1xRkWk

p.s. That’s it I promise, no more election posts until at least 2014 (unless of course you all vote Liberal Democrat, we end up with a hung parliament and we go through this all again in October!)

General Legal IT

LinkedIn to replace InterAction?

April 19, 2010 Jason 11 Comments

I caught a status update of a ex-colleague of mine on LinkedIn regarding InterAction today.

“wondering if LinkedIn will be the death of InterAction for CRM”

Now I don’t know if this was just a sound bite as a result of a bad experience of InterAction he had today or a genuine question of the possibilities on Linked In?

But either way it is an interesting question. Have walled off contact and CRM systems reached end of life? LinkedIn certainly has gained popularity to the point where it is the de facto standard professional social network and with that comes a wealth of information on “who knows who” that an in house system couldn’t hope to capture.

Then like most social networking platforms it has an API. Now I’m not sure how open the LinkedIn API is but would it take too much work on say Tikit’s part to integrate their eMarketing suite?

As almost every Legal IT or Legal Marketing person that has used InterAction will know the benefit comes from the data and therefore won’t it just take a small shift in LinkedIn technology to leverage the wealth of data it has in it for use in house?

So, in a week that has seen the demise of Ning as a free service, has fighting the de facto standard (in Nings case facebook) just become impossible in the long run? All it will take now is for facebook to shift it’s Fan page infrastructure slightly and introduce a private network facility and it’s bye bye Ning.

What do you think?

General IT, General Legal IT

Backups – that dull bit of IT that someday you wish you’d done!

April 12, 2010 Jason Leave a comment

Everyone who has ever lost data from their computer knows the importance of backups and for a law firm (no matter what size) it’s critical. I don’t suppose there is much point in me outlining the detail of why? But if you are interested in a good summary of why backup is a good idea try this site.

Also don’t fall into the trap of assuming that electronic data is not as safe and so keep everything as a piece paper. More often than not electronic information is just as safe (if not more so) if looked after. Take a look at this story as to why a printout in an offsite facility is not necessarily that safe!

If you work for a big law or mid-sized law firm, you’ll probably have an IT department and they will probably have some or all of the following:

A regime of daily and weekly backups of your data
Transfer of older backups to offsite locations
Larger firms may have multiple online data centres with your data replicated between them

For small law firms the picture may be different, but still there maybe a tape or disk backup. This may be taken offsite or perhaps even locked in a fire safe.

But even with your data backed up, there is more to just having the data safe when it comes to recovery from a disaster.

One benefit of a disk based backup (for example, on a small scale, a USB drive) is the fast recovery time. Just plug it in and access the data (in tech speak this is known as a small RTO or recovery time objective). Also there is no worry that at the time you need the backup the restoration software is not available!

For big law this switch to disk based backup is fine, this is why many have set up their multiple data centres, but what about small firms? USB drives can handle computer failure, but what about fire, flooding or other natural disasters? It’s a pain to keep swapping USB drives and taking one offsite or to have to lock it in a fire safe overnight etc (especially as the most convenient time to do the backup is overnight!)

Well take a look at this drive I recently got my hands on. It’s called an ioSafe and it’s main aim is to resolve this very problem!

It’s basically a fire proof, shockproof and waterproof USB drive. I’m not brave enough to trash it in the quest for a YouTube video demonstration of its capabilities, so you’ll have to take a look at these demonstrations!

BBC – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8449893.stm

Channel 5 – http://fwd.five.tv/gadget-show/blog/episode-1-the-desert-challenge Note the follow on point on the C5 website on how they could have got the data back following the gadget show demo.

So what’s it like as a USB drive?

Well apart from the size and weight of the device it works pretty much as you’d expect. It’s low noise, there isn’t any noticeable speed difference to old my USB drive. The only mild criticism I’d have is that the activity light on the front is a a bit dim. But basically it’s a USB drive, and it just works as you’d expect!

The big benefit I can see of a device like this to a small law firm is that it can cope with a fire, a flood or I guess an earthquake! And the benefit over a DVD backup being taken offsite is that it can give a fast RTO (this could also be the case for it being used in conjunction with tape backups in larger firms to reduce the RPO – recovery point objective (more tech speak I know, but that basically means the acceptable amount of data loss measured in time i.e. a days worth of data lost if you restore to that DVD that went offsite yesterday).

All ioSafe hardware also comes with a Data Recovery Service. So should a drive be damaged for any reason ioSafe will spend up to £500 to recover the data and then send it back to the customer on a replacement device!

For pure backup it’s a great concept and perfect for small business, but I can see a question and a future threat that you may want to consider:

The question – cost?

A 1Tb version is £260 vs. a 1Tb standard USB drives cost of £80
The value is in the fireproof, water proof aspect. Is it worth it? Well I guess if you look at a decent fire safe being £100, needing an extra drive 2x £80 to be able to pack a USB drive away each night in the safe. You’re at the same price! Then factor in the ioSafe convenience and benefits of the DRS should there be issues with the recovery and the ioSafe doesn’t look too bad value wise!

The threat – cloud based backup!

There are some cloud based backup options but for law firms I see a few issues with these at them moment:

Confidentiality – ensuring that this is met and for those particularly outside the US that cross jurisdictional issues don’t crop up
Cost – most are subscription based and charged at cost per Gb. There could also be data transfer costs depending on your internet connection deal with your ISP.
Risk of the company going bust and losing the backup of your data.

Longer term I think cloud based backup may be easiest form of backup, but for now have a look at the regime you have in place and check whether it would keep your law firm going in a disaster. If you’re after a little more piece of mind with a USB based system, then maybe ioSafe is just the device for your practice?

General Legal IT, Legal

Generation Y trainees about to shake up Legal and Legal IT

April 5, 2010 Jason 6 Comments

We’ve been away this Easter weekend to visit my wife’s family and whilst out yesterday I happened to get into a conversation with an ex-trainee of a Big Law firm. As I got on to explaining that I worked in the IT dept of a rival firm it was interesting to hear his questions and thoughts on Legal IT.

It left me thinking that anyone waiting for the current tech savvy trainees to give us Legal IT professionals an easier time ought to stop reading this post now as I’m about to depress you!

In fact if this trainee was typical of those joining law firms then the demands on Legal IT are going to get worse (or better if you’re up for the challenge). A couple of points stood out:

Frustration at the pace of change in corporate IT. The bemusement at why law firms can’t keep up with software like he could at home. “We were still on Office 2003!” he commented as though this was a ridiculous situation. My comments on the difficulties of upgrading thousands of PC’s got a kind of “So what?” reaction.
They do understand the IT dept but only the roles of those at the coal face. The service desks and IT support staff. They are unaware of the size and roles in the rest of IT.

Now this may have just been the situation in that particular law firm, but I doubt it. The challenge that stands out to me from this is twofold:

The struggle of getting the old lawyers to use computers is going to change rapidly into a demand from new lawyers to use the latest computers and software. This I’m sure is starting to happen already, but it will only increase. Why shouldn’t a lawyer be able to do with his work kit what I’m doing now with my own kit (writing a blog post on my laptop travelling up the M5 whilst connected to the internet via my windows phone which is acting as a wireless hotspot! **).
There needs to be better engagement at the trainee stage with IT. Get the trainees involved in the IT strategy early in their careers may reap benefits later.

Things are not going to get any easier for Legal IT, the demands on the corporate IT dept won’t drop off they’ll just be different.

Oh and the challenges for Law Firms generally won’t get easier either. This guy got disillusioned with the long hours, no life culture of city law and quit to pursue other interests. Generation Y is going to shake things up in law in more ways than one!

** to the iPhone users out there. That windows phone is not only acting as a wireless hotspot, it’s also playing MP3’s through the car stereo and scrobbling to tracks to last.fm. That’s multitasking!

General IT, General Legal IT

email, hate the stuff!

March 23, 2010 Jason 3 Comments

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about email recently and I mean a LOT! I’ve concluded I hate the stuff, both on a personal level and on an enterprise level. It’s like sand, it gets everywhere and you can’t get rid of the stuff. And even if you put it in a sandbox, you’re still finding the stuff all over your feet and clothes for days.

The worst thing is that email plays to our natural instinct to hoard. We actively go and collect the stuff. Then we keep hold of it for years! I know of lawyers who have mailboxes running in the Gb’s and have inboxes with tens of thousands of items in them. I remember doing a rollout in 2005 and noticing PST’s in lawyers mailboxes going back to the early 1990’s!

So what does it matter if we collect the stuff? Well let’s ignore the fact that as a lawyer there should be an organised file somewhere (PDF) and just look at the pain they cause…

First off the performance nightmare!

The chances are you’ll be storing all the stuff in Microsoft Exchange and Outlook like most corporates.

Matt Cain, lead email analyst at Gartner. "We forecast that Microsoft will get 70 percent of the commercial email market by 2010”

Bottom line is big mailboxes equal bad performance (unless you’re lucky enough to have a quad core desktop with a solid state hard drive at work!). There are a number of factors involved in Outlook performance, but basically big in size (Gb) is bad and big in number of items is bad!

Sure Exchange 2007 brought improvements as did Outlook 2007 Sp1 on the desktop. And Outlook/Exchange 2010 may bring more, but if email usage continues to grow then they will just be playing constant catch up (also I bet most of you are on Office 2003!).

Then you have to worry about storage!

There are probably gigabytes or terabytes (or petabytes!!!) of the stuff that your organisation collects. More and more money thrown at playing catch up with shelves of discs to collect all the emails you hoard. Sure if you’re a small firm you can outsource your email to say GMail or as a large corporate perhaps to a hosting company (it might ease the hassle but probably not the cost). In fact I suspect that maybe this is the future, we will treat email as a utility like with we do electricity. But that’s not addressing the problem is it? It’s like buying space at Big Yellow Self Storage because your back bedroom is full and you can’t bring yourself to throw away your shoe, comic, book, record (delete as applicable) collection!

So what’s the future?

Can’t we just kill it off? As well as performance and storage there’s the time sucking controlling nature of the stuff. I was hoping instant messaging (IM), wikis or social media would kick in and reduce emails dominance (like facebook has virtual killed my useful home email, I say useful to distinguish from the almost spam messages I get from sites like LinkedIn, Amazon etc). It’s starting slowly in firms but IM is like the healthy vegetable sat next to the krispy kreme doughnut of email!

I don’t have all the answers for the problem above unfortunately. But if someone can solve them for me, then from a lawyers perspective I did come up with an idea for organising the stuff that would require virtually no effort on the lawyers time. No filing, no tagging, but that’s a post for another day ……

General Legal IT

Explaining IDOL

March 8, 2010 Jason Leave a comment

On Friday I got a simple explanation of how IDOL fits together with other applications (like WorkSite and Zantaz). I was so simple and obvious that after a few days mulling it over I can’t believe I’d got confused. But for those new to world of IDOL I hope this little video of the explanation I got may be a light bulb moment for you too!

Also it may be worth mentioning that this video was put together in about 10 minutes! Take a look at the site http://www.xtranormal.com/ it’s a great tool for quickly putting together an animated video to explain things.

WorkSite Tips & Tricks

The Human guide to Workspaces

March 4, 2010 Jason 11 Comments

Workspaces. They’ve been around for quite a while and I’ve thought about doing a post on what they are since starting the blog. The aim being to try and easily explain the concept of workspaces and libraries within the Autonomy iManage WorkSite document management system (DMS). So basically removing the tech speak and explaining what they are in “real life” terms. I was going to title this post “The Dummies guide to Workspaces”, but apart from possibly getting sued for copyright infringement I figured the concept of Workspaces and libraries are terms that to be fair aren’t that easy to grasp. So, here it is. Let me know in the comments if it hits the mark.

Let’s start at the top. That green blob in Outlook under FileSite or the application called DeskSite on your desktop. The document management system (DMS) itself, think of this as your firm. In a paper world this is where everything is stored. DMS = Your firm

Now inside your office or firm you can have many of Filing cabinets. This is the place where your documents are stored. In the DMS these are pretty much what are known as the libraries. Library = Filing cabinets

You can group these in logical ways just like filing cabinets, a row for Litigation, a row for Real Estate or maybe you just have a bank of cabinets for all the firms clients. It’s exactly the same for your libraries in the DMS. You might have one way of grouping them, you may have many. e.g. Litigation Library = Litigation filing cabinets

Right what’s in the cabinets? Yes, files and typically lots of them! In the DMS this is known as a Workspace. Workspace = File

Your firm will probably have hundreds or thousands of these files. Some of which you’re working on, some of which are just stuck in the filing cabinets (let’s not touch on those in archive today!). How do you organise those you’re working on? This is where your desk comes in! Your desk, the place where you put your files. In the DMS this is like the list of files under “My Files” (you may have it labelled My Matters or My Woirkspaces). My Files/My Matters/My Workspaces = Your desk

This list can be changed by removing files or adding new ones. Remember though you’re just using these files, they aren’t just yours. Update them and all the office can see the updates. To add these in the DMS you would use a search to find the workspace (file) and add it to your My Files, in the real world you would go and get it from the filing cabinet and put it on your desk. Same concept.

Back to the file. Within the paper file you can arrange the documents with tabs and/or folders. Within the workspace (file) in the DMS you can do the same. Tabs = Tabs, Folders = Folders

Within tabs you can store folders, within folder documents and emails.

Finally that thing called “Subscribe” what on earth is that? This is basically the ability to look at your colleagues desk and see their files!

For those that struggle with the concept of workspaces, hopefully that will make some sense. From here you can read on and learn about how you can apply security to these workspaces (files) (worksite security pt1 and worksite security pt2).

General Legal IT, Technical

Human Computer Interface

February 22, 2010 Jason 1 Comment

Such a dull title, but that was the title of one of my final year modules at University. The textbook is probably in the loft somewhere. It was all about designing applications to be intuitive and easy to use (a much harder job when everything was DOS based!).

A couple of things over the last week got me thinking again about the design of applications from a user perspective and how important this is.

First off was the launch of Windows Phone 7 Series.

Clearly Microsoft finally “got it” with this release. They went back to the drawing board and designed something from a users perspective. Grouping things together in a logical human way (rather than technical grouping). Take a look at the video over at MSDN.

Second though was the interface with the most potential, Microsoft Live Labs Pivot.

Basically it is an interface into huge amounts of information. It allows you to slice up information in different ways, allowing you to go from huge amounts of data down to small amounts and back out in logical and connected ways.

It’s quite difficult to explain how this works using text, so take a look at the video over at the Microsoft Pivot site – http://getpivot.com/

In a law firm the possibilities for this are huge.

Law firms have huge amounts of data in documents and emails that this kind of interface would be perfect for. Imagine this being the main interface for Outlook or your document management system. You could slice up your emails quickly to find the information you were after. Or slice up your documents to collect together specific types of agreements, in specific jurisdictions etc.

On the developer page there are a number of challenges. One of which is a front end to SharePoint. I’m going to put my own challenge out there for any legal software developer to front end Autonomy iManage’s WorkSite, imagine this being the user interface of DeskSite!

Uncategorized

Law Firms, the good times are gone for ever!

February 10, 2010 Jason 6 Comments

Is the recession over? From a UK perspective I guess the answer is “just about!”

So as we are now on a slow road to recovery when will the good times return? Well I’m going to put my neck out and say never!

At least not in a return to what seemed to be the halcyon days between 2006 and 2008. My thoughts are these will be seen as the pinnacle of law firm revenue and profits per partner and I honestly think they’re gone for good.

Agree/Disagree? Let’s take a look at the graphs for big law UK (the figures are an average pulled from the top 20, to give a better picture of BigLaw firms generally). *click the images to get a larger size*

The growth is starting to slow, but is probably dipping in real terms. Due to the top 20’s truly global nature, their growth will probably look as if it is continuing for a few years as they receive greater revenue due to their size increases and global markets.

A better picture of the plateau being passed is to look at the picture for the mid sized firms. 2008 being the peak, the revenues are starting to fall.

But this is just a small dip isn’t it? Once we’re out of the recession things will move upwards again. Hmmm, if you look at the Profits per partner, the picture is much worse. And after all isn’t profit the real indication of the “good times”.

But again isn’t this just a dip until the markets pick up again?

I don’t think so. There are a number of factors why I think this drop off post 2008 isn’t just a dip which law firms will bounce back from.

The move from the old style bill by the hour and for those that continue to bill by the hour, the pressure to keep costs low. As one IT Director put it “Yes we’re looking at alternatives to billable hours… but only because we have to”. I can’t see us not having to, clients will continue to make us!
The UK (and US) markets are pretty saturated. There isn’t much room for growth. The introduction of the Legal Services Act 2007 as well as further commoditisation of legal work will put more pressure on fees.
The costs were slashed across the board in most firms through 2008-2009. And still profits were down! All those expenses that have been deferred (and I bet there is a fair bit) will start eating into future years revenues.

And there are many challenges of the recession and economic downturn yet to come.

Although many firms this recession have been sensible and avoided over enthusiastic job cutting, there have been plenty of pay freezes. This could be a drain on costs in the coming years as staff want that raise! The problem will happen first in the support depts., the staff there have a market for their skills outside legal. So the market could dictate a rise in salaries even if legal would ideally like to keep wages low.

As the graphs above show it’s having less of an affect on BigLaw at the moment, but as competition grows fierce in the mid sized firms, the BigLaw could see their home markets coming under more and more pressure. It’s only so long before BigLaw can rely on the non-UK revenues to keep the growth going, eventually you run out of places to grow!

So what’s my point? That Legal is a basket case and lawyers will have to get used to smaller pay packets?

No, I’m not saying is that Legal is a basket case, just that the peak has been reached. From here on in the competition will start to hot up, but as with any mature business this is good news for the client and good news for innovation. There will be winners and losers, but we’re not going to see all the top firms continue to grow. Overall the average will plateau, but within there will be firms that really increase revenue and profits and there will be those that really drop!

We’re in for a really interesting time in legal, seeing how firms change, how they innovate and from a personal point of view whether they really embrace IT and start using it as an enabler of change rather than a utility.

After a lot of talk of this happening and a few false starts, I think we’re now in for interesting times!

No Option for Law Firm