Fifteen years after: they didn't get it then, they still don't get it now

Written by Charles Christian  | 23 January 2012

I’m currently writing a new edition of my 1998 book Legal Practice in the Digital Age and, as part of my research, I’m looking at some of the issues I considered then (the best part of 15 years ago when I was writing the original book) to see whether they are still relevant today. Obviously there are some technology developments – such as social media – that weren’t even on the radar then that are mainstream now, and other technologies that today are so embedded in law office culture that we forget what a big deal they once were. For example in my conclusion to the 1998 book, two of the key technologies I recommend readers should invest in are email (or electronic mail as we still called it in those days) and websites.

It’s amazing to think that anyone running a business – even a legal business – should need prompting to invest in email but in 1998, checking your emails was still something many law firms (and legal technology vendors for that matter) only did on a Friday afternoon if they had nothing better to do. Fast forward to today and we are hearing some people predicting that email is in terminal decline and will be supplanted by social media. (Personally I don’t see that with the current generation of social media platforms we have.)

As for websites, back in 1998 only 400 law firms in the UK had websites – and many of these were pretty dire brochureware sites stuffed with every pointless gimmick website designers could throw at them. (Anyone remember the annoying <BLINK> HTML tag? Gosh we used to think that was so cool but it’s not even supported on Microsoft Explorer anymore.) Turning to the present day, there has been a huge increase in the number of firms with websites. Unfortunately many of these are still pretty dire brochureware sites stuffed with every pointless gimmick (such as Flash) website designers can throw at them.

And then there were those technologies that should to have made the grade but somehow never quite crossed the chasm into the mainstream. The Great Auks, Dodos and Passenger Pigeons of the legal IT world that could have been contenders but failed. The most glaring example of this phenomenon is videoconferencing. Back in 1998 I was backing it as a technology to watch – in fact I even had a videoconferencing terminal – but the technology never reached a sufficiently critical mass to take off. Simply put, there were not enough people out there to conduct videoconference calls with, so why bother investing in the kit if you are never going to use it. Great idea in theory but in practice most law firms said “we’ll invest in it when we know there is going to be enough call traffic to make it worthwhile” – but there never was.

It’s like the old joke about telephony: the most important development was not the invention of the first telephone but the installation of the second telephone. True there were bandwidth issues, with the telecommunications infrastructure of 1998 unable to support delay-free videoconferencing (there still are bandwidth issues in many parts of the UK) but the biggest problem was pricing. The stuff was plain too expensive for most businesses to contemplate using, particularly as there was no critical mass of potential videocallers out there waiting to dial in – and because it was so expensive (still is) that critical mass never materialised (still hasn’t). There is still a lot of finger-pointing going on here but the manufacturers have to shoulder some of the blame for being greedy and pricing themselves out of the market. (For the record, my videoconference system was an El Cheapo brand and the manufacturer subsequently went bust, ironically the same year it won a government award for innovation. Nice award, shame about the balance sheet.)

Anyway, my really ‘Big Idea’ in the original book was that law firms had spent the previous 25 years (from the early-mid 1970s when law office technology first started to take off and leave behind the world of elecro-mechanical comptometers and manual typewriters) investing millions in pounds in computerisation and office automation projects that approached IT from the wrong direction. With a few exceptions, all this money was spent on inward-looking, back-office administration-type systems (such accounts and PMS, wordprocessing and DMS, case management, CRM, etcetera, etcetera) when what they should have been doing is concentrating in outward-looking, client-facing systems that make life easier for their clients.

For example, in its early days Amazon established a reputation and market for itself by focussing on its public website – its online storefront if you like – and not on its back-office services. In fact reports at the time suggested that Amazon’s supply operations were based on primarily labour intensive manual processes (some of the online supermarkets in the UK had the same approach) but that didn’t matter because the customer got the shopping experience they wanted and in due course Amazon conquered the market and made enough money to install whizzy systems.

Unfortunately law firms have never really understood this, they are obsessed with internal procedures at the expense of client service delivery. The fact is most clients (corporate and private) couldn’t care less whether a law firm has a multi-million pound SAP system chuntering along in the background or has its entire administration handled by monkeys sitting away at typewriters, while taking time off from retyping the entire works of Shakespeare. All they want is their matters handled efficiently, on time and to budget.

Now 15 years ago client extranet portals, virtual dealrooms, interactive case management systems and similar collaborative technologies were thin on the ground, so there was some excuse but today? Well today, the firms still don’t get it and still don’t seem to understand the concept of client service – as any successful business knows, you’ve got to keep the customer satisfied. And in the 21st Century that means delivering services through the channels the clients find convenient!

Yet, if you skim through some of the debates wafting across the internet today, you’ll see nothing but complaints from clients about the service delivery they get from law firms. With a few exceptions, most firms’ approach to collaboration on the drafting of large documents is shambolic with general counsel having to cope with confusing track-change files or scan PDFs back into their WPs to get a document they can edit. As for social media... most firms’ reaction is to give clients 99 reasons why they can’t provide the kind of user friendly, interactive interfaces that clients are used to from using FaceBook.

But change is on the way, there are a number of vendors out their offering interactive, collaborative, iPad-friendly products for the Facebook generation of clients – the dreaded Generation X and Y – who are increasingly calling the shots. However, in the UK at least, most of the interest in these systems is coming from potential providers of ABS-based legal services (alternative business structures) rather than traditional law firms. ABS businesses understand the importance of service delivery – clicks and data rather than bricks and mortar. The danger for traditional law firms is that these ABS organisations will do to law firms what Amazon did for High Street bookstores – and wipe them out.