Serving up Video for Law Firms

23
Feb
2010

Martin Langan

Cloud Computing, where you do not own the physical IT infrastructure and avoid capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider, is a hot topic under consideration by many Managing Partners and IT Directors. Cloud services include such things as data storage, computer servers and software as a service (SaaS).

Software as a Service (SaaS) has been gaining a lot of ground in the last year or so and I am encountering many start up firms that have decided that this is by far the best source of applications for them.  Established firms are pencilling into their diaries a review of resources with a view to moving to SaaS as their existing provision and support contracts wind down.

As one IT Director put it at the recent Legal IT Show in London, “Move things to the cloud that add no value to the firm, when they amount to no more than plumbing.  Move things out when the cost of buying and / or maintaining them internally is very high.”

Charles Christian, in The Orange Rag reported from the Show that a number of law firm delegates said that videoconferencing was now high on their shopping lists.  I believe that videoconferencing is about to come of age, but I would suggest that this can only happen effectively if a SaaS model is adopted, perhaps as Nica Faustino of Legal Video Network has coined it, “Video as a Service” (VaaS).

Videoconferencing is coming to the fore because a number of factors are combining to make the technology desirable, if not essential.  First, many firms are extending their catchment areas out of their localities and regions, owing to their web presence (quite apart from the big boys who have national and international brands).

Secondly, consolidation in the markets is driving that geographical reach further as fewer firms service the same or growing numbers of clients.  This is happening in every legal sector: in house legal departments are reducing panel sizes; the Legal Services Commission is, through best value tendering, insistence on IT driven claims and reporting and ongoing reduction in real levels of remuneration, causing firms to fall out of the supply chain; and in the middle referrers are through the market consolidating the number of firms that can undertake conveyancing, personal injury claims and even estate administration and wills at any substantial level.

Thirdly, the first two ingredients bring about a need to communicate with clients and others associated with the work being undertaken for them, over a long distance.  Email and phone is not always enough and the cost in monetary and carbon footprint terms of visiting clients or expecting them to visit the lawyer is not viable.

Why then VaaS?  Why not maintain each network and get them to talk to other networks?  Quite apart from the “move the plumbing out” argument, the plumbing itself, or rather the mains system it has to run along (to keep with the water engineering analogy) presents very particular problems and solutions.

End users expect a video call to work as easily as a phone call and to experience good quality.  When this does not happen, they shy away from using the technology either externally for clients or even internally to save travel time and expense when engaging in inter-office meetings.  For national firms, those time costs and travelling expenses can be very substantial.  This negative reaction is not surprising, because a poor quality video call can turn what should be an enhanced communication where body language and nuance can be read into an irritable and frustrating exchange.  I have been told of a partners’ meeting over video when debate on an item on the agenda that was of a sensitive nature degenerated into a hostile atmosphere due largely to the video quality that exacerbated already heightened tensions.  No one would want to risk replicating that experience with a client interview.

Traditionally, firms deployed ISDN or used their private network for video, and the public internet for external video communication.  For particular clients or inter-office requirements private networks were installed, but such networks operated as islands of communication and did not assist with engaging with the world at large.   Although the public internet cannot by itself guarantee quality of service, videoconferencing over the internet is more and more often used with acceptable business quality over links with upstream of 512Kbs or above.

Although end users want a video call to be as simple and effective as a phone call, the traditional data communications used for that purpose are not sophisticated enough for this to happen.  The telephony infrastructure that supports voice calls was built on highly structured carrier network architecture that is simply not in place for the IP based videoconferencing environment.

This is where the cloud comes in.  Specialist providers deploy gateways and bridges for video and TP and effectively provide a video exchange in the cloud, thereby replicating in video the experience that end users expect from voice calls and therefore demand for video if they are to use it.  More and more VaaS service providers use this technology to provide quality of service during video-calls.

I fully expect 2010 to witness significant growth in videoconferencing by forward thinking firms, but this will be sustained only if VaaS is deployed to harness the technology effectively and make lawyers and their clients and associates want to use it.