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30 August 2010
Well we reach the final day of ILTA 2010 (Thursday 26th August) and for me it was just a morning of sessions before I had to get ready to leave Las Vegas.
The first morning session was a look at Law Firm economics, “Next Generation Law Firm Economics” (#ORG15). A really interesting look at the economics of a law firm over the last few years and what this means for the future. A couple of snippets that stood out were:
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27 August 2010
Today was going to be “Autonomy day” and for the morning that was the case. The first session I attended was “The Search Is Over with iManage IDOL: Frontend and Backend Perspectives” (#AUT1). Initial feeling about the session was that it was going to be a bit of a sales push for IDOL search, but some of the presenters actually gave a real good “war stories” type run through of implementations.
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25 August 2010
OK this is an update on Tuesday, the conference is so busy that I’m losing track of what sessions came when and when I spoke to various people. But lots on good information gained both from the sessions, the vendors and the people at the conference.
The first session on Tuesday was on email management (#INFO5). The satisfying part was that all the presenters’ firms were having the same difficulties with email as we’re having. A few key points stuck out:
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24 August 2010
The first full day at ILTA started with a keynote speech from Jason Jennings who shared his “5 Secrets to Put Strategic Unity on the Fast Track”, you can search for soundbites from the keynote as well as the "5 secrets on twitter as the #ilta10 hashtag has been in full use this week (I expect on Tuesday the hashtag will be busier as the WiFi problems that dogged most on Monday seem to be sorted!). But to save you searching the 5 were:
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16 August 2010
This week a couple of things cropped up to remind me of my predictions for the top 5 technologies for Legal in 2010. In particular that I had search at #4 and my thoughts on why I think next year this will be moving up the charts.
First off is my first recent experience on Autonomy iManage WorkSite 8.5 working with IDOL and using search to retrieve email out of a 30m+ document library. As I tweeted at the time it made me want to take my email out of Outlook and put it in WorkSite! The search was so much better than Outlook 2003 Advanced Search (although recently I’ve used Outlook 2010 and the search in that is itself so much better than 2003!).
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06 August 2010
In this second post on Outlook 2010 I’ll be taking a look at the calendar functionality. There are some really nice features that I’m sure will please a lot of lawyers (and if not the lawyers then certainly their secretaries!). There are plenty of screen shots which you can zoom into by simply clicking on the image. So first up is a look at calendar views and there are a few nice touches to point out here.
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27 July 2010
I’ve been running Microsoft’s Office 2010 on my home PC for about a month now and have to say I’m impressed. Well as impressed as you can be with an email client, a word processor and a spreadsheet application!
I thought I’d share in a few blog posts some of the really nice features of Outlook 2010 that I think will be useful for lawyers. For the first post I want to take a look at a couple of nice ways in which Outlook 2010 helps you organise and find email.
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28 June 2010
On Thursday myself and a couple of colleagues attended a breakfast briefing from BigHand at Gordons law firm in Leeds, accompanied by plenty of bacon butties from the Roast! It was one of a number of briefings that they are doing throughout the UK on the back of their recent acquisition of nFlow.
As well realising that it’s not just Herbies that have hot meeting rooms, there was information on the nFlow acquisition. But for the most part we were shown demos of some of the new features being planned for future versions of the BigHand software (I think most were for v3.4). Below are some of the key functions that stood out for me (I was making notes on my touch screen Windows Phone whilst trying to keep up with the demos, so if you’re interested in a specific feature I’d double check my understanding with BigHand!)
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07 June 2010
Law firms print paper, in fact they print LOTS of paper! I recently heard of a secretary printing off 6-8 inches of paper for the file (you know you’re printing a lot when your margin of error is 2 inches!!). I am therefore pretty sure that the cost of printing is rather significant cost for law firms.
So why on earth do it? There are two main reasons I’ve come across:
1) Keeping a good and proper file
“All the emails and documents must be printed for a paper file, it’s been like that for years and it isn’t changing on my watch.”
Come on, there isn’t any reason to do this. It’s not a regulatory requirement to keep a paper file, a good and proper file yes, but that file can be electronic. The only reason I could understand is maybe in a small firm, one that doesn’t have a document management system (DMS) to organise the electronic file. But why are lawyers in medium and large firms still doing this?
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18 May 2010
Last week I attended a Workshare user group event down at Herbert Smith’s offices in London. If you’re a Workshare customer I can say that (apart from Herbies meeting rooms being far too hot even with the aircon on) the user group is worth attending. It was a good mix of user feedback, product direction and case study and definitely not too heavy on the sales.
The point of this post though is to look at a couple of interesting products on the horizon. Both in my opinion take Workshare up against vendors that traditionally haven’t occupied the same space in Legal IT.
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13 May 2010
Yesterday was the official launch of Office 2010 and it looks like this is the year of Office. And that’s Office from Microsoft not the “Open” kind as some people would have predicted.
A lot of law firms I guess thought about Office 2007, but due to one thing or another (one big one I guess being the recession) stuck with Office 2003. But now on the back of what will probably be a mass shift to Windows 7 it’ll be Office 2010 that joins the party (the show of hands in yesterday’s Workshare user group backs me up on this).
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05 April 2010
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!
"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. " 
