General Legal IT

Give them a bigHand!

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Sorry, I know that’s a terrible pun!

A warning, this is a bit of a techie post. So for the non-IT readers of the blog, a summary of the post:  “if more vendors/suppliers did what bigHand do in their software design your IT department could upgrade software or change the settings for you much faster!”

On with the post…

As firms grow in size there are a number of IT challenges that can become more and more difficult due to the additional numbers. One of these challenges is those “small” upgrades to get to the latest version that seem to lengthen exponentially with the number of extra desktop PC’s supported. This also goes for changing the configuration or settings of those software applications. Especially when you want to alter a setting that is located locally on the PC (for example, iManage FileSite holds a lot of it’s client settings/configuration in the local PC registry, whereas with Workshare it’s in an XML file on the PC).

bigHand though seem to have a different approach.

At the moment we’re looking at an upgrade of our bigHand digital dictation installation to v3.2.3 and because of this I spent Tuesday on a technical training course for the new version. During the course we went through the client configuration.

And in bigHand for the most part these can be set using roles in the central database. This means they’re very simple to change instantly and also means you can simply manage different configurations for different people. All this can be done without the need to deploy patches, upgrades or do any amendments on the desktop PC.

Other settings for things like drivers to use for microphones can be managed using group policy using the bigHand provided administrative template file (.adm files). Again no mucking about on the desktop PC.

Simple and brilliant!

So if you need to disable a menu option for all the users? Simple! Just amend the role and apply once centrally! This makes upgrades easier as well as your client deployment can be a simple default install without the need to heavily customise for all those specific settings (especially if you have one configuration for fee earners, one for secretaries, one for support staff etc etc).

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General Legal IT

Sent Items – current bane of email management

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Here’s a problem for you all, let’s see if this blog post can generate some comments on possible solutions.

Lawyers travel a lot, whether they’re in a regional firm or a global firm they will travel and they will want to use IT whilst they travel (especially email). Now although we are in a WiFi world the hotspots aren’t always accessible or cheap and so offline or limited connection is still the norm away from the office.

The problem I’m building up to is caused when you want to file email in a matter centric way within a document management system (DMS). I’m sure the ideal for most lawyers is to maintain a full electronic file using the DMS just as they’d maintain a full and proper paper file. But the electronic file is usually the current file too and thus they want to have access to these emails when away from the office (the same as historically they would have carried a pile of papers in a briefcase).

As a lawyer in the office, from an Autonomy iManage point of view using WorkSite, I can maintain the electronic file for all my documents. But the answer for out of office access is either by using their OffSite product or by using the WorkSite for BlackBerry product. Both an expense, did I say I also didn’t want to spent a lot of money solving this problem?

Now with WorkSite 8.5 the new synchronised folders within the Outlook Inbox is fantastic, I can keep all my emails in Outlook/Exchange (which is running in cache mode so all my emails are on my laptop offline or available in the Blackberry) and I know that they are being filed/synchronised into WorkSite. Thus at the end of the matter I can remove the folder in Outlook with confidence that the emails are on the electronic file.

Perfect!

Now here’s the problem. Sent items! What do I do with them?

Filing them has always been difficult, products like Send and File help with this by suggesting filing locations as I send the email. However if I move the email on Send and File then I can’t refer to the emails out of the office? But I can’t copy as I want the ability to keep my Sent Items clean like my Inbox, removing emails I’ve finished with!

An ideal would be for Send and File to move the email into the synchronised sub folder in my Inbox, that way it’s filed, available offline and out of my Sent Items. But I’ve checked with Autonomy, it doesn’t do this!

So there it is. How do I keep my Sent Items clean and tidy, have access to my emails through Outlook cached mode and ensure filing in the electronic matter?

Comments very much appreciated!

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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 IT

Microsoft fights back

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It might not be with products that directly relate to law firms, but Microsoft does seem to be positioning itself for a fight back against Google and Apple. There have been three stories in the last few weeks that I think point to this:

  1. Announcement of Google Chrome OS. Now this one is an odd one to point out as on the face of it it seems to be a Google pulling away story. But it’s been the subsequent “what ifs” that caught my eye. Particularly the ones like this “Free Windows 7 Internet Edition To Tackle Google Chrome OS?“. If Microsoft offer Windows 7 free, even for a limited period, they could and probably would get such a foothold in netbooks as to kill Chrome before it launches.
  2. Microsoft is to launch a music streaming service. If they can get this right then this may be the service to seriously challenge iTunes. A Spotify type service allowing free music streaming supported by adverts. If integrated into the xbox would put it right in the centre of home entertainment and if they could somehow hook it into the Zune then finally the iPod may get competition (one off cost for a Zune and then free music!)
  3. Finally the announcement of a free online version of Office! A real challenge to Google Docs. Yes, Google may have the head start but Microsoft have the trusted brand here, Microsoft Office. I mean wouldn’t you rather use Word? This last one may be of interest to law firms!

Microsoft are starting to join the “Free” business model in the consumer market and could really start to fight back in the battle against Apple and Google. I think this is a good thing, competition makes better products and if Microsoft really can bring ideas from the excellent xbox division into their business offerings we may get some real improvements in usability over endless extra functionality.

From a law firm perspective it will be interesting how the development of the web based Office goes and how the consumer model of a “cloud” for all my documents and emails evolves in the business environment.

After all if I’ve unlimited email capacity with no performance drop off (e.g. GMail/Hotmail) and access to my documents and word processor anywhere (e.g. Google Docs/Office online) at home, will I accept the storage constraints and performance constraints of the desktop products at work?

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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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General IT, General Legal IT

Does IT matter in law firms?

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I read my copy of Computing magazine today and the comment section caught my eye. It was an article entitled “Focus Resources on what really matters” by Martin Butler, the basic premise is that IT has become caught up in a drive for efficiency at the expense of business success. In the current “economic climate” there is of course a natural tendency for cutting costs, corporate IT departments are usually large cost centres and thus are prime targets for cost savings. 

It reminded me though of an article I read some years ago about the shift of IT to a utility function akin to the railways or electricity companies (IT Doesn’t Matter by Nicholas G. Carr published in the Harvard Business Review). The premise being that these businesses “open opportunities for forward-looking companies to gain strong competitive advantages. But as their availability increases and their cost decreases – as they become ubiquitous – they become commodity input”.

These are opposite views of IT, one as a continuing driver for business growth and one as a driver for business efficiency and cost savings.

Now, I’ve started reading Richard Susskind’s “The End of Lawyers?” and I’m currently at the point where he talks about “technology lag”. This is the lag between two forms of technology: data processing and knowledge processing. The former (data processing) he puts as the “use of technology to capture, distribute, reproduce and disseminate information.”, the later (knowledge processing) a “set of technologies that help us analyse, sift through and sort out the mountains of data that we have created and helps make them more manageable.”

Richard Susskind points out that we are between these two forms of technology, in law firms I agree. And I think Martin Butler’s view of the IT function is the one that will facilitate this move and be able to supply the “Knowledge Processing” in law firms. I’m afraid that Nicolas Carr’s IT function will give us very efficient and cost effective departments that are stuck in “Data Processing”! It’ll be interesting as we climb out of the recession which law firm IT departments become.

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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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General Legal IT

Enhancing WorkSite searching (please can Miner “slicing” be added to FileSite!)

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WorkSite 8.3 Express Search/WorkSite Miner.

This tool has been out a while, but unless you jumped to WorkSite 8.3 with the Velocity search engine or are lucky enough to be one of the WorkSite 8.4 with IDOL implementations you probably haven’t used it.

WorkSite-Express

We’ve just completed an 8.4 upgrade and so we’ve had chance to use this tool. It basically works like a desktop search. It sits in your system tray until required and can be activated with a simple key press (default is Ctrl+Ctrl). Then simply type in a term and hit return. The term will then be searched across your default library (this can be altered using the drop down).

You can use usual boolean operators (AND, OR) and also you can use key fields to be more specific e.g. in this example above To: to denote where an email is to me (you can also search doc numbers, document or workspace names etc). Right click on the documents returned and you get the usual WorkSite DMS menu options.

Apart from a quick way to launch your documents I see the real power of this application being for finding emails. Something that is difficult in the standard FileSite or DeskSite applications given the volumes of email in a typical document management system (DMS) library.

As mentioned you can search quickly using the Express Search and its key fields for email (To: etc), plus adding say a word or two you expect to be in the body. If the number of emails is large you can click the “Show All Results” and launch the WorkSite Miner application.

WorkSite-Miner

Again this is a simple application that basically searches, but on the fly you can “slice” up the results in a very easy way. Either by ordering using the columns, dragging the columns into groupings, adding further search terms etc. Nothing earth shatteringly new, but very effective.

This gives a much more flexible way to order your results to try and identify the item you are looking for. This is particularly useful for emails, especially now that on a typical legal case you could see thousands of emails.

Also from within the Miner application you can preview the documents and emails (like Quickview in FileSite) and right click on them to get the standard WorkSite DMS actions.

I really hope that the Miner capabilities of “slicing” up your results are integrated into FileSite in the future. But in the meantime this really simple product that takes advantage of the newer search engines in WorkSite 8.3 and 8.4 (and 8.5!) will be a great addition to WorkSite on the desktop.

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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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A law blog written by someone from IT or an IT blog written by someone who works for a law firm