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Jason Plant
Jason is an Applications Manager at a large international law firm, based in Leeds (UK).
His path to an IT career was started when his dad bought him a Commodore Pet in the early 80's, this led to a degree in computer science before a career in the IT industry spanning almost 20 years. He worked initially within the utility industry before moving to legal. During his time working for Yorkshire Electricity he worked as a COBOL developer working on large mainframes before moving into client/server software development.
Seeing the challenge of legal and the lack of IT in UK legal at the time, the "green field" development opportunities offered helped his decision to switch to legal in 1996. He began working on case management software for personal injury claims before moving into intranet development. Following this Jason moved into project management working on a variety of projects in legal ranging from knowledge management, through intranet and extranet services to document management (the early adoption of WorkSite 8.0 in 2004).
After a number of years in project management Jason took on his current role of applications manager responsible for KM and Document Management systems. His work in this role focuses on defining strategy for the applications and services, budget management, programme and project management and support functions.
Jason is the father of three children, a school parent governor and youth leader at the local church. He is a non-league football fan having passed back his Manchester United season ticket to the Glazers to become a founding member of FC United of Manchester.
You can read more about Jason at LinkedIn at http://uk.linkedin.com/in/jasonplant and follow him on Twitter at @nooption
"A common vision for control and governance of email and documents that will satisfy legal requirements and address cost and feasibility concerns from the IT department is slowly emerging. The publication of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) has helped a great deal by codifying the common components that the legal department needs and that IT must provide." 
"The persistence of temporary backup files for four days presents obvious security and privacy issues. If such files contain sensitive, confidential, or otherwise privileged information, their existence can expose a law firm to malpractice risk, court sanctions, or other serious problems / penalties
"The UK Legal market is certainly not a leader in Social Networking but one or two firms are using some of the tools such as Linkedin, Blogs, Twitter and a couple are experimenting with Facebook as a consumer facing marketing tool. " 
