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Jason Plant
| 14 May 2012
This month has seen the release of Blackberry 10, at least to the developer community. If that’s what RIM intend to release later in 2012 then I’m afraid we may be all bidding adieu to the familiar sight of Blackberry in Legal and beyond.There is no way that a touch screen OS from Blackberry will break the Android and iOS dominance, nor keep Windows Phone from being the #1 challenger to the top 2! These other three are slowly chipping away at the “risks” that ActiveSync technology supposedly brings compared to the BES infrastructure and a copycat OS isn’t going to save RIM.
| 11 April 2012
Legal IT software shocker!
It’s taken me a while to write this up but a number of weeks back I saw a product demoed, that for the first time in ages had me thinking “Yes!”. Actually I originally saw this product months before at Tikit’s Word Excellence day, Jan Durant was demoing it and saying how fantastic it was, but at that point I didn’t see what the fuss was about. But in the recent demo I did, the idea is simple if not a bit boring, but it just seems exactly right!
| 04 January 2012
I did my review yesterday so let’s crack on and look at what I think will be emerging technology for Legal in 2012 or that will be technology that will feature heavily in Legal in 2012.
Speech Recognition: Yes I know I predicted this in 2010 but I really think we will start to see more uptake of this technology in Legal. It’ll creep more into consumer and as such we’ll become more acustomed to speaking to machines. Read more of my thoughts on speech recognition in this post from November last year.
| 03 January 2012
Before I take my annual look of emerging technology for Legal in 2012 or technology that will feature heavily in Legal in 2012, let’s review what I thought would be key things over the last couple of years.
My 2010 list was as follows:
Mobile Applications - Search - Office 2010/Windows 7 - Instant Messaging - Speech Recognition
And then in 2011 was:
Glue Tech - Microsoft Lync - YouTube - Mobile Applications - Office 2010 and Windows 7
Now given the similarity between the lists it’s clear that things don’t move at a fast pace across the whole of Legal. But I didn’t do a bad job (alright some were bleeding obvious, but they still caught some Legal IT vendors on the back foot. Office 2010 anyone?)
| 29 November 2011
Last week I attended the BigHand user conference at the excellent Renaissance Hotel in St Pancras. Rather than write up a review of the whole day I thought I’d comment on an item that was high on the days agenda, speech recognition.
Now before I get accused of following certain people or the current trend generated by SIRI let me first point out item #1 on this blog post of mine from the 1st January 2010!
But the feeling I got from the conference is that finally the technology, that has been around in Legal ever since I’ve been in this vertical, is finally reaching a point that it is useable.
| 23 November 2011
I had very high hopes for WorkSite 9. Admittedly, a lot of these hopes I developed in the period of version 8.2 (i.e. before the Autonomy merger) so a lot has happened since. But because of this I feel just a little underwhelmed by what’s in v9.0.
Now don’t get me wrong, there is some good stuff in 9.0 that is going to be really useful for a lot of firms, but there were a couple of things that I’d hoped for that haven’t materialised. First off though let’s take a look at the things that are there:
Unicode: Now if you are a one country, one language firm that has no international offices nor international clients then this probably isn’t a big deal.
| 13 October 2011
Well it’s been a bad few days for RIM this week (and I dare say a difficult time for a fair few IT depts in law firms as a result). And it looks like it isn’t just contained to EMEA either, reports suggest a spread to the US now.
A few things spring to mind off this:
1) It’s going to be one heck of a case study for IT service failure. From the technology that failed, the (lack of) disaster recovery and what resilience was built into a critical system through to studies into how not to manage an incident (the failure in communicating to customers etc). No matter how much redundancy you put in place we know things like this do happen in IT.
| 04 August 2011
So Microsoft have pulled out of the Legal vertical. It has caused quite a buzz on twitter amongst us Legal IT folk. The question is why. I think the comment on the knowlist article sums up the two opposite conclusions:
The glass half full position is that this is a temporary, cost cutting reorganisation exercise. The glass half empty position: Legal – too fussy, too complicated, too small, not enough dollar.
There’s probably truth in both. Why are Microsoft in business? To sell products! Their professional services team are effectively there to help them do that.
But what is there to sell to Legal? We all use Microsoft Office in a big way and aren’t going to shift anytime soon. We’re tied into Windows as most Legal IT vendors only provide their software for that platform.
Workshare Point, the law firm perspective - part 2: WSP in Word
| 28 July 2011
Part 2 of our Workshare Point review: WSP in Word
OK so let’s take a look at Word. Clicking on File Open brings up a WSP dialogue box replacing the native Word open dialogue.
This type of dialogue replacement will be familiar to a user of any DMS and you get obvious views (My Matters, Favourites, Recent). There’s a checkbox allowing me to keep the document checked out (allowing me to stop others amending the document whilst I’m working on it) which is set by default.
Workshare's new SharePoint based DMS: the law firm perspective
| 21 July 2011
“SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint!”. There you go, I’ve written Steve Ballmer’s keynote if he ever gets invited to ILTA to talk to a Legal IT audience (My inspiration? See Steve in this video for a developer conference.
Yes, it’s that hot topic in legal IT, SharePoint as a Document Management System (DMS). In particular, Workshare’s latest offering WorksharePoint. This isn’t “Workshare’s DMS” but a product that utilises SharePoint as the DMS and enhances it through its tight integration.
| 07 June 2011
Last week I attended one of the Bighand regional roadshows, held again at Gordons LLP in Leeds (I so wish other Legal IT vendors would do these local visits, why should the customer travel down to London all the time?).
I came away thinking there wasn’t much new in the latest releases. But then I guess that’s what a good piece of software should do, tweak a little but don’t add so many features that you ruin the core thing your software does well.
But there were a few new “tweaks”, some of which I’ve highlighted below.
| 10 May 2011
You can’t have failed to hear the big news today, Microsoft’s $8.5bn purchase of Skype. I’ve read a fair few tweets this afternoon about how it’s a bad deal. That they’re playing catch-up with Google and Apple, they paid over the odds etc. But I think it’s a great deal for Microsoft and also for lawyers.
We all know Skype is huge in the consumer market, in Europe I’d say Google nor Apple have anything like the consumer share that Skype has. Microsoft today suddenly became the market leader in the consumer market place.
But that’s not why I think it’s great deal.
