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Legal

The law firm of the future

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Seven years ago we had a training day for the IT department, we were set a task to set a task to prepare a very short presentation on “The Law Firm of the Future”.

The reason I remember this was thanks to an article I saw re-tweeted on Twitter last week from the Financial Post in Canada. The article was about changes in law around the globe that effectively enables law firms to launch an IPO.

This reminded me of a slide we put together in that 2002 presentation:

futurelaw1

Looking at the rest of the slides some of our other points weren’t bad either.

  • Fixed price contracts for legal work, leading to lawyers working on projects rather than cases.
  • Full project management expertise for the legal project manager who has a team of lawyers, secretaries, IT personnel etc for each project.

These two bullets may be specific, but I think we were trying to point out that the traditional bill by the hour partnership model would not last. Quite in line with current “in vogue” thinking during the today’s economic climate (for example, see Optima Legal’s warning on small firms and the Adam Smith, Esq. blog report from the London City firms)

Not bad thinking for a bunch of IT geeks!

Back to the IPO point in the Financial Post though. I wonder how long it will be before we see the first IPO of a larger firm? Given the current economic turbulence, probably not soon. But thinking about the proceeds an IPO would probably realise for partners of a top 200 firm, surely it can’t be that long before someone tries!

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General Legal IT

Efficiency and productivity cont.

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Following on from my post yesterday I caught this post from Thoughtful Legal Management. Overall I think David’s and my sentiments are similar, we are both looking at how IT can help efficiency or productivity.

I can’t help pull up on the point within the post though “ Their IT technicians, I suspect, have set up their system in a matter that does not fully meet the business needs of the law firm and the staff and lawyers working there.”

This is where we (the collective we, IT and the lawyers) are going wrong, the lawyers think IT need to see the world through the same lens as them and IT wish that the level of IT knowledge in the lawyers were higher. For IT to work we need both sides to understand each other.

Much as the media would like to portray the geek in the basement advocating it should be “turned off and on again” we’re not all like that. I like to think that although I’m in IT I do know a bit about how lawyers work just like when I worked in the utility industry I took time to understand the requirements of that business. But I know I’ve still plenty to learn, but I see it as my responsibility to do so.

Back to David’s post though, I’d like to see “Microsoft to focus on productivity from the ground-up; by paying more attention to the smaller business user rather than the consumer market” too and in my opinion they should start to learn the mantra “less is more”!

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General Legal IT

Alternative Billing – What Does It Mean For IT Staff?

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There has been quite a bit of activity on blogs and twitter recently about the billable hour, questioning its validity in the current economic climate (see this story on law.com), however it’s this article on 3 geeks and a law blog that caught my eye (in fact I hope they don’t mind as I’ve kind of plagiarised their blog post title!). You might also want to take a look at The Client Revolutions posting on the subject which in turn references this post by Adam Smith.

The reason I pointed out the 3 geek’s post though was that it addressed the question on what it means for support staff. It got me thinking on how the legal IT department would change if there was a sudden shift to flat-rate billing.

I think Greg is when he talks about the one word that gets mentioned when alternative billing is put about “efficiency”.  Now when IT is done right one thing it can be very good at is creating “efficiency” (conversely it can also be great at making things inefficient if it’s not done right).

Take a look back a few years to the Woolf reforms in the UK and in particular the effect on the personal injury market. Insurance departments started to use technology to make things more efficient. In particular Case Management software enabled some of the work lawyers did to be pushed to paralegals or even secretaries simply by following the workflow of the system.

Similarly Knowledge Management systems can enable firms to draw on a wealth of previously created precedent documents, meaning a reduction in time taken to draft new documents.

These systems have been used in the past and are used now, but I imagine that more and more there will be a demand to use technology to drive down costs. However I think before this happens there will be the usual approach to cutting costs, downsizing and budget cuts! So for 2009 I think (as with most industries) we will see IT departments shrink, but as the push for more efficiency takes hold I think the firms that step up and embrace technology to achieve efficiencies will be the winners. 

The challenge for IT is to help lead this “revolution”!

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General Legal IT

Law firms aren’t immune

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Post on The Lawyer today : Legal Job Watch: UK 200 TOTAL REDUNDANCIES: 2199

The interesting thing about The Lawyer’s reporting (and LegalWeek for that matter) is that the figures are just for the lawyers! There is no figure for support staff in consultancy or redundant in any of the firms?

Can you read anything into this? I mean todays news on the job losses at Nissan didn’t just total the managers or engineers, but all staff. Why are the numbers from KM, facilities, the secretarial teams or IT not of any interest to readers of The Lawyer?

After all it’s not as if it’s because there has been zero job losses in these areas is it.

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General IT, Technical

2009 – the year we’ll be always online?

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Will this year be the year we are able to be always online? Fire up your laptop and you’re connected wherever you are?

I remember have a conversation with our CIO about 18 months or so ago, discussing why for document management we shouldn’t invest too heavily in enabling people to “go offline” when they’re out of the office. The simple reason I put forward was that we’d soon be always online.

The reason behind my comment wasn’t due to that current fad in the UK – 3G dongles from Vodafone, Orange etc but a technology that was on the horizon. WiMAX. This technology is effectively like WiFi but over much greater distances.

I just got a twitter tweet from a friend in the US about such a service that has started in his city. It looks like these services are starting to rollout in earnest. Personally I think this will kill WiFi hotspots and (hopefully) mean we soon won’t have to think about online or offline, if your laptop is on it’ll be connected to the internet or via VPN to your work network and email.

There is one cavaet to this and that is if you do business globally. It may take a while to see even WiMAX hotspots when you’re in the middle of say Dubai for example (for those that work in the UAE they know the difficulties and cost of telecoms/networks in that region!)

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General Legal IT

Where will the law firm IT department be a year from now? – part 2

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The legal core technologies (DMS, CRM etc) – where next?

So what about those core technologies (the key IT systems)? Well most law firms now cannot function without IT (who could have said that even 10 years ago!). email, the DMS and the global finance applications are now ingrained in most law firms as not just core, but key technologies.

Take a look at Legal Technology Insiders list of software used by the UK top 250 and you’ll see that all firms pretty much use a common set of key technologies. But mention web 2.0 (or whatever you like to call it) and my guess is there will be very few firms who have this type of software as a key system. Is this because it is considered a technology fad or is it inappropriate for corporate use? I don’t think either is true, in fact I suspect that there are a number of firms are already using Wikis, blogs etc in small niche areas.

I think law firms though are like any other firm, find embracing these technologies is difficult. To implement them you almost need to just put them out there and let people use them how they want to (which is why facebook, twitter, you tube etc have succeeded, no one told people how they should use them). This method of implementing new software I think is alien to most firms period, it’ll take time to change attitudes, procedures etc<

But we need to start to expect people to be IT savvy, just as we expect to have people employed that can read and write. Being proud of “not understanding computers” is no longer an option! I think firms with these type of people will start to push web 2.0 products in 2009.

What about MS Office?

This is probably the one piece of software that is on 100% of all legal desktops. And I suspect almost everyone has Office 2003, some brave soles may have jumped to 2007 but I bet the percentage is very small. The big question though is, will people ever move to Office 2007 or Office 14? I starting to think that not many will, do you really want any more functionality out of office? Office 2003 does the job, so unless Microsoft force you to do it through some licencing or support agreement there is little incentive to move.

However the one thing that could change this is if the desktop footprint in Office 14 gets much smaller and the application gets much much quicker, then we may see people switch in vast number! This is not as far fetched as it sounds, from performance results of the leaked Windows 7 beta it may be that MS now get this is a key issue!

Mobility

Honestly I don’t think law firms are ready to embrace the “80% office space”. Letting staff  hot desk their staff, saving on the usual daily empty 20% of desks. Sure BlackBerrys will thrive, remote desktop access or web based access will see more take up and messaging (Office Communication Server) will take off, but only if these were implemented in 2008 or before. I can’t see anyone getting budgets for doing initiatives like this from scratch in 2009.

Summary

So in summary I think most legal IT depts will still be around in a guise that we will identify as being roughly as they are now. I think in the current climate they will have been trimmed through cost cutting, but on the whole it won’t be fully outsourced. The IT dept of January 2010 will probably be smaller and it will probably have spent less in 2009 than in previous years. I think there may be a move in 2009 to some small scale outsourcing of specific functions taken up by a fair few firms, but which part and how much will depend on the firm. I also think there will be a firm in 2009 that will go for a large scale attempt at cost saving and outsource the lot, but personally I bet they will relive the last recessions outsourcing blunders and fail.

Overall though I think most depts will take a real look at how to make what they’ve got work more effectively. As well as looking to improve performance, reliability of the current services (the key issue I bet almost all firms will tackle!) I think there will be a switch from constantly upgrading and implementing the core technologies (DMS, CRM, Office etc) to more web 2.0 applications, either social type sites or mashups of their main systems.

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General Legal IT

Where will the law firm IT department be a year from now? – part 1

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I noticed a thread on a Legal IT forum over on LinkedIn last week posing the question “Where will the law firm IT department be a year from now?“. I started to post a response and realised I had much more to write than I could fit in one forum post, in fact there was so much that I’ve split it into a couple of blog posts.

This one looks at outsourcing and the overall purpose of a legal IT dept, then tomorrow I’ll post up some thoughts on the core technologies and what next.

Will IT stay in house or become an outhouse?
What are the options for outsourcing in the legal market in 2009? Personally I suspect many law firms IT depts will consider this, from an IT service perspective there is no real difference from a law firm to any other firm.

I don’t think that many law firms will try to outsource the whole dept, some have tried with other support functions (e.g. A&O’s 2003 move of document production to India) and almost all avoided outsourcing the whole function.

Some firms may find an outsourced help desk works well, others an outsourced data centre or development team. This is probably the most sensible approach, I don’t think the legal IT market has reached maturity yet and thus is still changing too quickly to be run as a pure “utility unit”, which leads too….

Will IT be run just to keep the lights on or will they install lights that are better than their competitors?
I read an article a while back in the Harvard Business Review (Your Next IT Strategy, October 2001 – no online verion) explaining how IT would slowly turn into a purely utility function for business and be thought of like the electicity, just some cost you pay.

Is this the future for law firms IT depts? In times like the current economic crisis, if you just look at pure “numbers” then it is tempting to feel this is a sound proposition. After all IT is a large cost on the balance sheets. There is an argument to say this could start to happen in 2009, after all most of us now use a DMS (Document Management System), a financial system, a CRM system etc Most of which are the same, so why not just keep the same stuff going as a service you buy?

But if everyone has it and does nothing new with it, this loses some of the key things technology can bring. A competitive advantage for your lawyers. The legal IT world is nowhere near as advanced as say financial services, where IT is ingrained in the business model. But I think the law firms that start treating IT as a pure utility will soon find firms that innovate using IT start taking their clients as the economy begins to pick up.

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