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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General Legal IT

Autonomy iManage’s first 100 days

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OK, I’m shooting the gun a little bit. It has only been 66 days since Autonomy’s takeover of Interwoven officially completed, but since it was announced back in January and 100 days has more of a ring to it I thought I’d round it up to the nearest hundred.

So what to make of the first 100 days of Autonomy iManage?

Let’s start with the Autonomy side of things. I can sum up my initial impressions with one simple statement “they are one hell of a marketing machine”. If they were on “The Apprentice” they’d walk it, Sir Alan loves a seller.

If you look behind the marketing sheen you see the one product seems to underpin everything, the IDOL search engine. Before I had any dealings with Autonomy I had heard about IDOL and that it was a very good product, but you really needed to work with it to get it to do what you wanted.

As most Interwoven customers will know the IDOL engine was “rapidly” introduced into WorkSite, IUS and TeamSite. I use quotes as this is technically true, but having seen it in WorkSite it isn’t a simple fit for the customer. The reason for this is because IDOL is very much a product in it’s own right. WorkSite and IDOL are “loosely coupled”. The IDOL engine itself has multiple components and configuration requirements (the licence key itself is complex, tied to a mac address!). This is far from the original verity indexer that was pretty straight forward (and Vivisimo Velocity engine that was very briefly available).

Don’t get me wrong, the product works, but what was once a DMS (Document Management System) with a simple indexer component is now very much a DMS and full blown search engine to manage.

This is not unique to Interwoven’s products. Although I can’t comment myself on the Zantaz 6.1 release with IDOL, I found a comment on it elsewhere that has similar sentiments for this product:

I have it in my demo environment and running for one customer already. It kicks AltaVista’s butt – but it is a bitch to get up and running.

And where as the technical team were out of the blocks like Usain Bolt, the training teams seem to have made a 100m start like, well like me! And because of this it is where I see some short term difficulties. The initial training sessions have been web based and frankly weak and there are only just starting to be UK classroom courses being scheduled (these are specific IDOL courses too, where are the integrated WorkSite/IDOL courses?).

And IDOL will need training, in fact I think that there will be a need for an “IDOL DBA” type function in most law firms (after all WorkSite, IUS and Zantaz are all IDOL powered now).

I forget what the general release target for 8.5 was, but I am sure it was summer ‘09. If that is still the case, then there are going to be a lot of UK customers in a bottle neck waiting to get IDOL trained. If I’m being harsh I would say the promise made at the last user group that the UK team would be ready to support the 8.5 IDOL release sounds a little hollow.

And what about support? Well two things stick out. First there seems to be some re-organisation or upheaval going on, whether it’s support being aligned in Cambridge or something else I don’t know. Nothing has been confirmed and I haven’t heard anything from Autonomy iManage, this is just a feeling I get. The second thing is there still needs to be a lot of knowledge transfer, it seems that old Interwoven people don’t understand IDOL fully yet and Autonomy people don’t understand the WorkSite product.

However these are early days and it shouldn’t detract from the fact the IDOL is a very good product! And most importantly it works with large volumes of data, which is good news for the biglaw firms and for the goals of WorkSite 9.0 (which one of the objectives I seem to remember was 50m+ document libraries).

It’s far from negative. It’s just that I feel a little like I did listening to Tony Blair at the moment, the Autonomy marketing machine is in full swing, but behind the marketing sheen things aren’t quite what they seem, yet.

But as I’ve said IDOL works and it seems very scalable. And from what I’ve seen so far of Autonomy engineers, they are a very capable technical team and if they can marry this with the iManage team in Chicago then we could have product that will continue to improve rapidly. Once the training and support teams catch up then legal has a great suite of products to utilise underpinned by one enterprise search engine.

Unfortunately I just see a H2 2009 that may frustrate customers keen to exploit some of the great features in 8.5. So the next 100 days will be the real test, can they get WorkSite 8.5 and IDOL IUS in the field with the training and support available? I could be wrong, the Autonomy iManage team could just have all their focus (technical, support and training) on getting everything set for 8.5 IDOL launch. We’ll see!

What are your thoughts so far?

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General IT

Lost in Stockholm : the benefits of mobile applications

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I suspect there are a number of organisations that lock their Blackberry or Windows Mobile devices down, stopping people installing applications on them. There are plenty of valid reasons for this, but there are some great applications that I think should be installed as default by all companies.

One of these is the Google Maps application (available for Windows Mobile and Blackberry), it’s especially useful if your devices have GPS chips in them (which a growing amount do).

I spent this last weekend in Stockholm with some friends, on one of the days we went our separate ways during the day and then arranged to meet up later.

I got a call about 4pm :

“We’re in a pub called The Londoner”

“Where is that?”

“Not sure, it’s just down from the Olympic Stadium”

“OK, do you know the street?”

“Nope sorry….”

There were some directions given at this point but as we couldn’t work out the starting point accurately I wasn’t hopeful!

Anyway the point of all this was to explain the benefits of Google Maps.

I fired up the application on my Windows Mobile device, the GPS located my position in a city I’d never visited before, I then used the integrated search function to find “The Londoner”. This searched was location aware and only searched for places and names near my location.

The description given showed I had found the correct place and from this point in the application it was a simple click to show directions and immediately highlight the path from where I was to the destination.

As soon as you move a little arrow shows your direction on the map so you can tell you’re heading off the right way.

The interface is extremely intuitive and on a 3G connection very quick, there is no jumping off into the mobile browser it’s all done in the Google Maps Application. And if the city has street view you can even access that on the mobile device.

Now clearly there is little business benefit of finding directions to a pub, but a travelling lawyer could use the app to easily find directions to a clients or the firms offices in a different city. There could even be savings if staff were encouraged to walk rather than jump in a taxi (which I bet is common when in a new city).

Now if only it integrated with your internal CRM systems ……

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General IT, General Legal IT

laconi.ca – implementing a twitter-clone or microblogging in a law firm

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What started as a business request for a “tickertape” application on the intranet has led us to the verge of implementing laconi.ca in our firm.

What is laconi.ca?

It’s basically a twitter-clone, a “Free and Open Source microblogging platform”, take a look at identi.ca which is a public implementation of laconi.ca.  For us though the laconi.ca application has been implemented on the homepage of the intranet, but the beauty of laconi.ca is you can just as easily use one of the twitter clients that support it (e.g. Thwirl).

At the moment the implementation is just in pilot with one practice group, but I can see word of mouth spreading this virally within the firm, like twitter has spread on the web.

Although I can claim some credit for thinking there was scope for a “corporate twitter” behind the firewall (see my post on Jaiku back in January), I can’t claim the credit for this implementation. Either by being the person to suggest the solution to the request for the “tickertape” application nor for being the team looking after it.

Our application architect saw laconi.ca as the solution and has implemented the application, here are some of the technical details:

laconi.ca is installed on the intranet on IIS/PHP5 utilising ISAPI_Rewrite from Helicon Tech (http://www.isapirewrite.com/), to a MySql 5 Database.

A javascript ajax front end was developed to laconi.ca’s twitter api utilising the jquery framework. All ui updates are via ajax – as it had to be compatible with IE6 🙁

User authentication is performed by NTLM challenge/response and delegated (via javascript header manipulation) to laconi.ca in order to avoid prompting the user for a login.

The javascript/html/css is bundled as a SharePoint content webpart which is displayed on the Firm’s intranet homepage.

Laconi.ca user accounts are kept in sync with AD via a java based ESB (enterprise service bus) message listener.

The application itself looks simple (just like twitter!) and that’s the beauty of it. It just does what it does without any complicated UI to learn.

microblogging

I really hope it takes off, as I think microblogging will prove to be an invaluable tool for a law firm. I’ll post an update down the line to update on how it goes.

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General IT, General Legal IT

Bibles

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There is one thing that has been on our teams “future” or “background” task list for quite some time, “Bible” creation. The ability to pull together documents, emails, PDFs, maybe even pages of documents into one final “Bible”.

Today I find the genesis to a solution on the Workshare blog.

Workshare PDF Enhancements
Workshare PDF Enhancements

This looks excellent, ability to add different types of documents, entire folders of documents and even individual pages of a document. Clear the meta data and add PDF security. Access to the DMS. All this needs now is the ability to generate a hyper linked index page (maybe that could be template based for branding) and that’d be a perfect solution!

Now pity we can’t get our custom 5.2 SR1 package to install and uninstall properly, but that’s another story…..

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General Legal IT

InterAction IQ

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I received an email yesterday about a new product from LexisNexis, InterAction IQ.

InterAction IQ automatically mines email correspondence to discover the existence and strength of previously unknown contacts and relationships.

Sounds interesting! There wasn’t much in the way of technical details of how it works, what exactly is it etc, but it sounds like a Xobni type of solution. If this is the case and it has the integration into InterAction to “make that information actionable” as they put it, then this could be really useful.

InterAction IQ takes relationship management to a new level – by mining correspondence and meetings between individuals automatically. The frequency of activity, messages, or even inclusion on “cc” lists are indicators of the strength of a relationship – all are factored into the evaluation.

Xobni is an Outlook add-in, that ranks your contacts based on the messages you exchange, extracting contact information and identifying people the messages are connected to. You can click through to explore the conversations you’ve had with those connections.

There are a few other bits of information that are worth taking note of:

  • InterAction IQ which is targeted for availability in June 2009
  • InterAction 5.6 SP2 is a required update for this new product

More information I’m sure will be on it’s way soon and most likely on the LexisNexis InterAction website.

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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 IT, Technical

Tweetdeck v Seesmic Desktop

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One of the benefits of twitter is the proliferation of desktop applications that are available to enhance the twitter experience (if you are still using twitter via the web then you want to try one or more of these applications). For a while I’ve used a combination of tweetdeck and thwirl with the later slowly getting less and less use.

Then this week I downloaded Seesmic Desktop and I’m a convert. They’ve basically copied tweetdecks best features and added to them.

That’s not to say I’ve given up on tweetdeck, there are plenty of opportunities for improvement in both camps. But I thought for a blog post though I’d highlight some of the things I see strengths in both and benefits of each.

Big benefits both bring over rivals:

  • Multiple columns/decks, allowing you to slice up your tweet feed in ways to suit you. Either group by user lists, keep an eye on twitter searches for specific topics etc
  • Integrate your facebook feed and post facebook statuses

Seesmic desktop benefits:

  • Multiple accounts! This is the killer for me at the moment and my big reason for switching, you can integrate multiple twitter accounts into one application and then group people across all your accounts (I would like to see the ability to post to one of more of this accounts in one go though like ping.fm, rather than one at a time)
  • Enhanced facebook integration. Not just see status timeline, but the whole facebook timeline

Tweetdeck benefits:

  • Twitpic integration is nicer, like the fact you can stay in tweetdeck and not have to jump across to a web browser
  • Twitscoop. See trending topics in a column/deck
  • You can post to your twitter account and facebook in one post (seesmic is an either or)

There are indications that Tweetdeck will introduce multiple accounts, so maybe I’ll switch back shortly. But once that’s there, then there is probably only one feature that will make me switch again. The killer feature I’d like to see is:

  • ability to either export my settings for import on another computer (regardless of OS) or better still have these stored online (in fact is it time for twitter to add groups as a permanent feature?)

Final note is for people with Windows Mobile devices. Get Pocketwit! It has many of the features on seesmic desktop and tweetdeck: multiple accounts, groups and integrated twitpic.

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WorkSite Tips & Tricks

WorkSite tip – cleaning up your My Matters list

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It’s about time I put up a post for another in the WorkSite Tips & Tricks category. This one is a couple of suggestions for helping manage your My Matters list (or My Workspaces, My files etc)

  • Use categories : rather than have one long list of shortcuts to matters, use categories to organise them into logical units (e.g. clients etc). This is a simple to do, right click on My Files and select New>Category. In the example below I have a “Group” workspaces category and then a list of my workspace shortcuts and another category which has all the IT workspaces.

categories

One of the annoyances of the FileSite app is the inability to remove >1 shortcut at a time, to tidy up for example. But there is a way to do this:-

  • To quickly remove shortcuts from My matters, rather than doing the right click delete many times, choose Add shortcuts…  From here you can go into your My Files and multi‐select shortcuts within this dialog, then delete all old workspaces in one go.
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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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412728826_923322f286_o

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)

dibbluptonalsop

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.

DLA-round-square DLA-piper-rudnick-gray-cary

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.

th_100_0401copy

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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