The roadmap to successful information governance
Editor
Engaging stakeholders with effective tactics – Part 1
Headlines today are frequently dominated by d(...)
AI in 2024: Should We Still Be “Moving Fast and Breaking Things”?
Editor
Where are things headed with AI in the coming year? What trends should legal IT professionals be awa(...)
Everyone knows the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." But few people know that little Goldilocks grew up to have a career in law firm IT management. Goldilocks worked her way up the ranks, consulting and working for law firms and then found herself as the newly minted Director of IT at the firm of Andersen & Grimm. She'd been there for a year when she uncovered a very similar problem to one she ran into as a little girl so many years ago in the forest - settling in on "just right."
Last Wednesday saw the closing awards ceremony for the Workshare Raspberry Pi volunteer project. For the past five weeks, Workshare has been working with Tower Hamlets Integrated Youth and Community Services to teach young people from the local community how to code using credit card sized computer Raspberry Pi. The course culminated in a competition whereby the top three applications won a paid summer internship with Workshare. All the young people who completed the course were also invited for at least a day's work experience.
BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has been the bane of the existence of law firm IT professionals for years now. Ever since the iPhone was introduced and then quickly gained in popularity amongst lawyers, there has been an internal struggle between law firms and IT when it comes to the support of BYOD. Lawyers want to use their choice of devices, while IT wants to keep law firm data securely locked up tight-and understandably so.
In his guest post "Big law, small law, new law, old law… it’s bigger than that" on Brian Inkster's The Time Blog, Ben Wightwick said, "Currently there are, broadly speaking, four types of CIOs: Chief Integration Officer; Chief Innovation Officer; Chief Infrastructure Officer and Chief Intelligence Officer. All CIOs will fall into one of these main camps." His comment really got me thinking. There is the old joke that CIO actually stands for "Career Is Over." But are there only four types of CIOs? I sat down with my extensive electronic Rolodex and started searching out other types of CIOs. In no particular order, this is what I found:
Well into the era of electronic discovery, few would argue against the use of technology to assist in document review. Predictive coding is the most recent attempt at taming the electronic data behemoth that presents itself as millions of pages for review. Clearly, one cannot apply the same methods that were established when a matter involved boxes of paper to massive volumes of electronic data. But does this new technology render keyword search obsolete? Is predictive coding inherently superior, or can they serve as complements?
It's a given that a law practice will not thrive, or even survive, if it doesn't set an impeccable standard for client confidentiality. In today's technology-driven world, however, the process of managing and securing that crucial, private information has never been more complicated. While having access to multiple modes of communication offers flexibility, the tradeoff is often the risk of lost information or unauthorized access.
How, then, can you guarantee that your clients' information remains easily manageable - and for your firm's eyes only?
The legal industry has been protected from market forces since the Greeks were orating in the town square, give or take a century or two. Today the business of law is losing its protected status as market forces are impinging. The attorneys’--and, thus the law firms’ --entrenched attachment to paper exemplifies yet again the legal industry’s resistance to the mandate of market forces to migrate toward electronic and digital records.
The thinking that ‘it is cheaper to store paper records than it is to scan them’ is misguided, simplistic, and just plain wrong.
For some time now, I have encouraged law firms to embrace change or pay the price of irrelevancy. It’s been my contention that because of the wide scale proliferation of mobile and cloud computing, 21st century legal consumers expect more from their legal counsel than ever before. They are used to instantaneous access to information and are more discriminating and demanding. They seek affordable, convenient, 24/7 access to legal representation using the latest technologies.
In early 2013, nQueue embarked on a project to better understand and share its customers’ cost recovery strategies. While there have been a number of industry surveys over the years on expense data capture, we chose instead to study actual law firm capture and billing rates. By analyzing what firms actually do—rather than what they say they do—we are to provide detailed and accurate benchmarking data. The result is nQueue’s Cost Recovery Data Capture and Rate Report.
At first glance, deduplication filtering is perhaps one of the easier concepts to understand for newly minted e-discovery practitioners. Most of us are taught that individual items that comprise electronically stored information (ESI) each have a unique “fingerprint” that may be used as the basis to automatically identify and filter exact duplicates that inevitably exist within a universe of collected ESI.
Are law firms big and small appropriately acclimating to the rapidly changing legal landscape or are they simply employing stop gap measures to make ends meet? Last month, the authors of an annual report on the U.S. legal profession attempted to glean the answer to that tricky ques-tion. And two New York City legal conferences also provided interesting insight on this topic as well.
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