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Three Legal IT gurus look at what can be expected next year
2010 – it’s a nice round number and the start of a new decade as well. Remember 10 years ago, the entire world was furiously updating code, fearing the end of the world when the millennium ended? Like most public hysteria, that panic turned out to be fairly ridiculous and we did indeed live to see January 2nd, 2000.
In the past 10 years, law offices have certainly made enormous strides in terms of process automation, workflow efficiency, and productivity enhancement by leveraging technology to the hilt. Now that the New Year is fast approaching, it is time to examine what 2010 will look like for legal technology. What major decisions and budget concerns will legal IT professionals face this coming year? How will legal technology providers be affected, from behemoths to underdogs? What will be the “hot items” on the MIS to-do lists of firms all around the world?
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" (Leonardo Da Vinci)
Has your law firm got a social media policy or a set of social media guidelines?
If not it is surely only a matter of time before they do. The rise of the risk management function in firms (not just law firms) means that as social media takes off, guidelines and policies will be put in place (take a look at this site for a raft of policies out there for various companies!).
I’ve been blogging (on this site) for a little under a year now and have already fallen foul a number of times, I have posted something I maybe shouldn’t have or ended up agreeing that it may be best I didn’t say what I had. So I think it’s in the interest of the blogger as well as the firm to have a few guidelines in place.
Continuing on from my last column (part 1), here are some more notes on SPC09…
Business Intelligence
PerformancePoint has been absorbed into SharePoint Server. PerformancePoint Services are included in the SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise license. There is also a significant update to the presentation graphics within PerformancePoint, including use of Silverlight, 3D graphics, and time-lapse charts.
Another big announcement was for PowerPivot (formerly project Gemini). The PowerPivot addin for Excel allows Excel to use the Analysis Services engine in memory, allowing Excel to work on very large datasets (millions of cells) very rapidly.
Well, it has been an extremely busy autumn, between attending a couple of major Microsoft conferences, an adventure in "out of country health care", and trying to actually do some billable work along the way, there has not been much time to think.
What I would like to do in this column is summarize the highlights of the Microsoft SharePoint 2009 conference in Las Vegas in October, and the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in November. Because there was a lot of content at these two conferences, this column is split in three parts. You are now reading part one, part two will be published on Wednesday and the last part will follow on Friday. There is also some techie stuff in here – more than usual. I encourage you to read on and skim over what is too detailed for you, there is a lot of interesting stuff coming.
I plan to follow this up in January with some thoughts on "what does all this mean for a law firm?"
Cloud computing. The latest buzz word in IT, one that is probably only knocked off the top in a Legal IT game of “buzzword bingo” by eDiscovery! I started writing this blog post a few months back, at a time when I’d been flash mobbed by “cloud computing” companies. The intention was to put down some of the things I’d seen that may be interesting for Legal IT people, together with some of my thoughts on “cloud computing”.
So what exactly is “Cloud Computing”? According to Wikipedia:
“Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.”
That help? Probably not, let me try.
In days of yore when the documents were all paper, you could simply lock your client folders in a file cabinet drawer, turn the key, and feel reasonably confident that no one could infiltrate that crack security regimen. Well, now that electronic and wireless communication dominates, and paper is usually mainly an output of files that originated digitally, data flies all over the place, flowing through cables and wires, and invisibly cruising through the air. If you can’t see it, how can you protect it? That’s a good question!
Law firms of every size, and all the employees that work for them including lawyers, legal assistants and administrative staff, are all vulnerable to data security breaches and identity theft. Certainly, such incidents harm the individual, often in a major way, but also they can have a direct, negative impact on the firm.
(Or Three lessons KM programs can learn from the Hollywood movie making machine)
Most of you will know that in computerese, reboot means to turn (a computer or operating system) off and then on again; to restart it. Of course if we’re applying this definition to a failed knowledge management program simply restarting the OS will produce the same results - not what we are interested in. So what if instead of the technology definition, we applied the Hollywood definition of “reboot’?
Hollywood has always done adaptations of books for TV and movies. To me the classic Hollywood basic reboot or remake is one in which you try to take everything that's iconic about the series/movie and try to weave it into a new story with a new and modern style. In some cases you toss out a lot of the old and simply start over - or “reboot” the franchise.
For a while I’ve been meaning to do a post on document collaboration, especially as working on documents with the client is such a key part of a lawyers work. In a typical law firm this collaboration is through backwards and forwards emailing of the document to the client.
I’ve had some more thoughts on this recently whilst doing a number of workshops on email management, a large portion of email traffic for a lawyer being this transmission of documents back and forth! To be fair this process works reasonably well, especially when you’ve got version controlled documents in your DMS (Document Management System) and tools like Workshare are thrown into the mix, either for use in comparison (e.g. using the Compare functionality or Deltaview as it was once called) or for power users using tools like the collaboration in Workshare Professional to track the multiple amends from various parties.
“Average reported savings from using matter management systems were 36.8% of outside legal spending.” Incredible, and not to be believed.
The claim comes from the 2008 ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey, which obtained survey responses from hundreds of ACC-member law departments. I have twice before challenged similar claims drawn from this survey, and won’t repeat my criticisms here (See my post of Aug. 5, 2005: average savings on matter management systems from survey of more than 250 law departments in 2002 was 16%; and April 13, 2007: from same survey in 2006, “average reported savings from using matter management systems was 11% of outside legal spending.”). Little of this do I believe can be substantiated.
Are you ready for WWW.JДSФИPLДЙT.CO.UK
As of this month the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) agreed to allow non-Latin script web urls. This means the address above could be a perfectly valid web address (domain name).
This gives a whole raft of opportunities for cyber squatters to snap up domains of companies, especially those that are based in the emerging markets of most international law firms, the eastern European, Asian and Gulf region countries. And as well as squatters if you have clients whose brand names are non-Latin character based or who trade in regions where the writing is non-Latin, it could be an opportunity to advise them on protecting their brands.
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.
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