Tag Archives: Legal

Legal

“A company from here doing rather well over there” and vice versa

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No I didn’t stop blogging over the last three weeks to spend the time on the campaign trail for the Computer Weekly blog awards! I’ve just had too much on in and out of work to come up with something to blog about (which reminds me of a previous post!)

I’ve had in mind a post about the mergers in legal this year. A follow up to the post I put up in July 2009 titled “Consolidation within the UK 200?” in which I predicted a series of mergers outside the top 20. I thought at the time that the competition in the legal market due to the downturn would force a squeeze in the mid-sized firms, but it looks like the consolidation has been nearer the top. There have been a number of transatlantic mergers within the top 20 (well top 25), not the “magic circle” but in those firms just below (in fact those below the transatlantic trailblazer DLA Piper).

We’ve had Denton Wilde Sapte and Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, Hammonds and Squire Sanders & Dempsey, Lovells and Hogan & Hartson and SJ Berwin in talks with Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe and then Proskauer Rose.

Norton Rose has taken a slightly different route into North America with it’s merger with Canadian firm Ogilvy Renault. It’s almost a shame UK law firms aren’t listed on the stock exchange as I’d be hedging a bet and buying up some shares in Herbert Smith!

So the consolidation is happening at a pace, but rather than on a national level it’s the globalisation of the larger law firms that’s leading the way.  I don’t think it’s over, there is still a mixed market out there. Some firms are now posting a rise in turnover, yet there are others that are posting an equal percentage drop.

I therefore stand by my earlier post. The consolidation at the top will only strengthen the brands of the large law firms, allowing them to hoover up more of the big (and medium) plc work. The mid sized firms will be subject to a pincer movement from the “big brand firms” above and also from the new firms that will emerge on the back of the Legal Services Act 2007.

What will the mid sized law firm look like in 5 years time? Will the £75m turnover “Jones, Jones and Smith” still exist or will they be background engine rooms for “Tesco” and “Sainsbury’s” in a legal world that has a few global big brand firms and household name branded legal services?

Whilst writing this post I came across a great document on the upcoming “Big Bang” for legal, it’s called “The Big Bang Report – Opportunities and threats in the new legal services market”.

Oh and no I didn’t win the IT professional (male) blogger award unfortunately, but it was great to be recognised by Computer Weekly and short-listed. Maybe next year!

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General Legal IT

LinkedIn to replace InterAction?

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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?

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General IT, General Legal IT

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

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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!

ioSafe

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?

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General Legal IT, Legal

Generation Y trainees about to shake up Legal and Legal IT

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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:

  1. 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! **).
  2. 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!

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General Legal IT

Collaboration – Google Docs just got served

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For a while I’ve been meaning to do a post on document collaboration, especially as working on documents with the client is such a key part of a lawyers work. In a typical law firm this collaboration is through backwards and forwards emailing of the document to the client.

I’ve had some more thoughts on this recently whilst doing a number of workshops on email management, a large portion of email traffic for a lawyer being this transmission of documents back and forth! To be fair this process works reasonably well, especially when you’ve got version controlled documents in your DMS (Document Management System) and tools like Workshare are thrown into the mix, either for use in comparison (e.g. using the Compare functionality or Deltaview as it was once called) or for power users using tools like the collaboration in Workshare Professional to track the multiple amends from various parties.

However I had a nagging feeling return that underlying all this was the email system and really this wasn’t what email was designed for. Surely there is a better way to do this?

So first off when I originally thought about this post it was Google Docs that had prompted the feeling above, with its ability to share the document in the cloud. This basically cuts down on the multiple copies of the document. Instead of attaching the document to an email and sending out to multiple people (= multiple copies) you create your document on the internet and invite people in to collaborate in real time. One click and they can edit and save the document online. One copy, always up to date!

For a brilliant explanation of Google Docs watch this video : Google Docs in Plain English.

Then this week I came across an article in my RSS feed for a product called DocVerse, a document collaboration plug in for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. For me this brings the benefits of Google Docs, with its online collaboration and real time document editing with a number of parties, together with the power of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint which I’m guessing is the standard for most law firms. This for me is the ideal solution.

Again take a look at this video explanation from the DocVerse suppliers.

This real time collaboration has to be the way forward. There is a but though and thus I think full adoption of this technology may be a few years off yet. The but is that there are a few hurdles IT depts and risk management functions need to get over first. The major one being “the cloud” itself. I read an article online yesterday that posed a question :

“Would you use a cloud-based service to store critical infrastructure documentation?”

45% said they’d consider it

36% said no way!

only 20% said definitely

That’s only 1 in 5 that would definitely be happy storing their documents in the cloud! Maybe someone good in math would be able to work out the odds therefore of you and your client being happy? And for this reason I think for large adoption this may take time, however for small firms who can move quicker than the large firms maybe the take up will be faster.

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General IT, General Legal IT, Technical

One to pass to your IP/IT lawyers

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Are you ready for WWW.JДSФИPLДЙT.CO.UK

As of this month the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) agreed to allow non-Latin script web urls. This means the address above could be a perfectly valid web address (domain name).

This gives a whole raft of opportunities for cyber squatters to snap up domains of companies, especially those that are based in the emerging markets of most international law firms, the eastern European, Asian and Gulf region countries. And as well as squatters if you have clients whose brand names are non-Latin character based or who trade in regions where the writing is non-Latin, it could be an opportunity to advise them on protecting their brands.

Unfortunately the change means that there are also more opportunities for phishing attacks through spoofing domain names.

For example, take a look at this url www.jаsonplаnt.co.uk It looks pretty normal right? However try the link, you’ll get a 404 or page not found. Why? Well the a’s are actually а’s (still confused? the first is a Latin character a and the second is the Cyrillic character a). A computer recognises them as totally different. Therefore sites could be “spoofed” using this Cyrillic method and be used to “phish” information from you.

Below is a (hopefully) high level explanation of how this new system will work.

First remember, computers work under the bonnet in numbers for pretty much everything.

So as it stands now there is a service on the internet called DNS (Domain Name System). This acts like a phonebook, turning easily understood domain names that you use into strings of computer-readable numbers, known as Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

There is also an encoding system that turns characters you type into numbers that the computer understands, this is called ASCII. This is what the internet DNS system uses now to translate the characters of the urls.

Technically the problem has been that ASCII was built for the Latin character set. And it is limited to the number of characters it can encode. To cater for all the worlds character sets; Latin, Cyrillic and Chinese characters etc, a new system was required. This is called Unicode. However the DNS “phonebooks” of the internet only understand ASCII**.

So to enable the new domain names to have all characters sets, a method was required to handle the conversion. The conversions between ASCII and non-ASCII forms of a domain name are accomplished by some clever algorithms called ToASCII and ToUnicode.

So take JДSФИPLДЙT, this is Unicode and so the ToASCII algorithm would be applied. Once it has been through this algorithm, a prefix is given to distinguish it from a standard ASCII name (otherwise you could end up with a totally different Cyrillic and Latin urls/domain names pointing to the same place!). The result is a unique name that can be looked up in DNS (**technically DNS can support non-ASCII but because of other limitations it has meant non-ASCII names be converted to ASCII).

Finally it is worth knowing that most of the popular browsers have introduced some methods to help with the “spoofing” by recognising when this new multi-language domain name is being used in this way.

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General IT, General Legal IT

another blocked social site

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When I started work for a utilities company during a placement year from university in 1991/92, all personal calls from your desk telephone were banned. If you wanted to make a personal call you had to use the office payphone. That’s right you had to wander out of the office to a payphone that for us was located on a different floor at the other end of the office. Sounds ludicrous now doesn’t it? I can’t recall the exact reason given at the time, but I’m sure cost and time wasting were quoted.

So I have a wry smile when I see articles like this one “One in Two U.K. Companies Block Social Networking Web Sites”.

To me the banning of social sites is just a ludicrous as the scenario I encountered in 1991. The common reasons for blocking given are:

  1. Time wasting costing firms money
  2. Legal risks, i.e. disclosure of confidential or proprietary information

For both blocking sites to me seems totally ineffective. In the age of Smartphones and Netbooks with wireless internet access (either WiFi or 3G) employees can and will use their own personal devices to access sites if they can’t from their work PC.

To me more effective methods are:

  1. For the first, surely a much simpler and effective answer is to manage your staff. This was what the utility industry had decided for the telephone by the time I returned to take a full time role in 1993.
  2. Surely a good policy written to explain to employees what is expected of them in terms of posting online? If you want to start one for your firm take a look at this great resource of social media policies.

I know first hand how social media can be a big distraction if not managed (I’ve started turning off my RSS reader during the day for this very reason), but it can also be a valuable source of information if used the right way. For law firms, in an age where we need lawyers to be as “clued up” as possible on social networks (see my last post!), banning them seems a step backwards!

So what does your firm do? Post in the comments and let us know (you can leave the firm name out if you wish).

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General Legal IT, Legal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Legal

Flexitime? It’s about time!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Legal

Consolidation within the UK 200?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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