Legal IT Professionals

I attended the first day of London’s Legal IT Show last Wednesday. Although it is sometimes considered the poor relation of the more glamorous New York event, following last year’s diary clash, this year the events were a week apart, enabling the keenest legal IT followers to attend, present or exhibit at both – with time in between to travel/recover!

The weather was better too. Although there were a few flurries of snow in London, we had nothing like the white out which hit attendance rather hard in 2009. This year, although the event occupied a noticeably smaller area of London’s Business Design Centre and there were clearly fewer stands, attendance seemed to have improved on last year, with all seats taken at Speakers’ Corner for many of the sessions on the first day.

Legal IT Professionals was selected as media partner to the electronic evidence and e-discovery forum 2009, held at the Victoria Park Plaza Hotel in London on 20th and 21st October. Joanna Goodman reports from the event.

The Electronic evidence and e-discovery forum 2009 was organised by AKJ Associates, which organises events focusing on business risk, corporate strategy and security management – key elements in managing electronically stored information (ESI) and e-discovery.

The timing of the event was fortuitous, coming only a couple of weeks after the 8 October judgment in the case of Earles v. Barclays Bank Plc by His Honour Judge Simon Brown QC in which Barclays’ award of costs was reduced due to its failure to conduct adequate searches of its electronic data.

Joanna Goodman tells about TheKnowList and replies to comments on her previous column

Although it is only a few weeks since my last column, I thought I’d let LITP readers know that August sees the launch of TheKnowList, the first independent directory for the legal IT community featuring leading law firms and suppliers across all product categories. I have to confess an interest as I am the editor of this essential – and stylish – A5 reference guide which is currently being distributed to UK law firms. To order your free copy – wherever you are – go to www.theknowlist.com.

TheKnowList offers a comprehensive directory of legal technology products and services. The editorial section comprises 21 features highlighting the key technologies that support modern law firms of all sizes, ranging from major infrastructure systems to flexible SaaS solutions.

Notwithstanding the economy, it is still conference and event season in the legal sector. I recently attended a meeting of the Adelaide Group at Berwin Leighton Paisner, which is organised by IT director Janet Day. The superb presentation by Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty was very well-attended, but the same could not be said for other legal IT events. Apparently, the Strategic Technology Forum in Spain was not as busy as usual. The reasons for this can be driven by politics as well as costs. ‘Our firm is making people redundant, so it doesn’t look good if we go off on a beano, whether or not the IT department has the budget for it,’ explained one IT director. IT departments are under pressure to achieve more with less and to present the right image both within the firm and externally – both within the legal sector and the legal IT industry.

By now you will have heard that Legal Technology Journal is no longer being published, hence the extended gap between LITP columns. I have to start by thanking people who e-mailed saying they’ll miss the LTJ. So will I – it’s sad to dismantle a really good team. But life – and legal IT – must go on. I’m a freelance writer and I continue to cover the legal and technology sectors – more news to come so watch this space as I’ll be looking for comment and input!

It could be said that Legal Technology Journal and the Legal Technology Awards went out with a bang. More than 450 people attended the awards and as someone who does a lot of work by e-mail and on the phone it was great to meet the legal IT crowd – not least the founder of this site.

As this is my first LITP column for 2009, I thought I’d highlight some of the latest trends: new challenges and new technology.

Firms are still focused sharply on Green IT, especially if it saves money while it saves the planet. As everyone also knows, London’s Legal IT Show was quiet compared with previous years. Was it the recession, a reluctance to travel – or was it the snow in London – an unusual occurrence which ground our public transport system to a halt? The keynote speech by James Woudhuysen focused on Green issues and their impact on IT. His book – on economics, energy and IT – is erudite and well written, which isn’t surprising given that James is a lecturer at de Montfort University, but it occurs to me that for an environmentalist, he is using an awful lot of paper. It says nowhere in the book whether it was printed on recycled paper…please correct me if I am wrong…

December’s news focused on the credit crunch and an obsession with shoppers’ footprints in London’s West End as early sales finally tempted Christmas shoppers. While some features pages focused on thrift, others asked whether we could really spend our way out of a recession. This doesn’t seem a sensible approach. I doubt that many individuals or families will be throwing caution to the wind in an attempt to save the UK economy and the Prime Minister’s reputation. And it definitely won’t be the case when it comes to law firms’ expenditure. Since my last column – and I know that it has been a while – I have spoken with a number of law firms in the UK and Europe, and certainly all the sensible ones acknowledge that the economic situation is transforming the nature of their work, which has focused on reorganisation, restructuring and insolvency as well as distressed transactions. Law firms are necessarily involved in the rescue deals that are hitting the headlines, so they are only too well aware of the impact on business.

Although some of the biggest firms report excellent half-yearly figures, the big picture in the legal sector is blurred by the fact that many are undertaking work that is driven by the financial crisis and the economic downturn –  insolvency and litigation departments are particularly busy. Notwithstanding this, the slowdown in transactional and real estate work has led to many firms announcing redundancies. The imminent danger is the possibility of a gap between the end of the ‘clean up’ and the market picking up again. Firms that do not consider their medium to long-term strategy risk falling into that gap. Law firms, like other businesses, are looking harder than ever at their own spending.

Value to the business

Where does that leave the IT department? Technology is critical to all modern businesses so ‘value add’ needs to focus on providing reliable and responsive systems and support as any downtime is expensive, wasteful and frustrating. Speed and user-friendliness are top priorities in order to make the best use of lawyers’ expensive time. In a cost-conscious business environment, it is more important than ever for IT directors to work closely with the business and demonstrate the return on investing in systems and applications that fit and support the business in terms of hard savings achieved through efficiency improvements and reduced manpower. As you are no doubt aware, there have been a number of high-profile redundancy announcements in law firm support departments too. Although it makes sense to outsource some services, this critical strategic element represents the core value of IT directors and their in-house teams.

I am delighted to contribute to the new Legal IT Professionals website. Let me start by introducing myself and flagging up some of my current and ongoing projects and a very important upcoming event in the legal IT calendar.

Legal Technology Journal

I am the editor of Legal Technology Journal, a quarterly magazine from Legalease, publishers of Legal Business, The In-House Lawyer and the Legal 500 series. Legal Technology Journal is essential reading for everyone working in legal IT, with a readership of some 5,000.

Legal Technology Journal is going from strength to strength – the summer issue was a bumper issue with more case studies, articles and pages than ever before at a time when many publications are clearly struggling for content.