Dec

31

2009

Filed Under Outsourcing, Future of law | Leave a Comment 

I usually leave it until the last minute to frame my “binary law” predictions for the year ahead. After all, a lot can happen in a month and it’s of course helpful to have the benefit of everyone else’s predictions first!

In the SCL IT & law predictions for 2009 (batch 1, batch 2, batch 3) Charles Christian and others see that in these straightened times one of the prime areas for cost cutting will be IT: firms will delay upgrades and expenditure on new systems where these won’t show immediate financial benefit and will increasingly look to outsourcing their IT requirements via SaaS and cloud computing services.

But we won’t get out of this hole simply by cutting IT costs and substituting outsourced services. As Linda Webster, Head of IT at Wedlake Bell, says, forward-thinking firms who see themselves as businesses and IT as a critical component of all our daily lives will be looking closely at every area of their businesses from how clients are attracted and retained to the methods in which work is produced and will be using this as an opportunity to deploy systems in imaginative ways.

This echoes the ever-prescient Richard Susskind’s entreaty (penned before the current recession had taken hold) that to respond effectively lawyers should “decompose” their work: look at each task in turn and honestly assess the optimum way of executing each. The resulting legal service will have its origins in numerous sources, each chosen for its suitability and efficiency, and combined in a seamless solution. He refers to this as “multi-sourcing” (deploying everything from in-sourcing, through outsourcing in all its manifestations, home-sourcing and open-sourcing to computerising; and even “non-sourcing” where the risk of doing nothing is negligible). The prospective protracted recession renders it more urgent that firms conduct such a review immediately.

It’s a certainty that this process will gain pace and 10 years hence we will have a very different legal services landscape; less clear is how far along the path we will be in one year’s time or what significant developments will have taken hold by then.

If the last year has taught us anything it is that we have to think long term. We’re in this mess largely because of short-termism. So I will leave you with no predictions for the year ahead. Focussing on 2009 will not help any of us; we need to put on the long lenses to see what we need to do to make a difference in the next year.

There is hope.

By Nick Holmes, 31 December 2008
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Dec

30

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

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I recently commented far too favourably on the the new Law Society Gazette site. There is no way to browse the archives which is frustrating. But to give the site some juice, the opinion sections in particular should be inviting our comments.

I’d have liked, for example, to respond to Clive Wismayer, Solicitor, Great Bookham, who recently penned a Letter to the Editor, from which:

I was interested in Joshua Rozenberg’s article on the doom-laden prognoses of Richard Susskind, who apparently believes that, in future, ‘bespoke’ legal services will be the exception.

With great respect, what utter tosh. …

… legal advice of any quality at all cannot and never will be susceptible [to] standardisation to the required degree.

I for one will not be buying Susskind’s book …

Now, I’m sure Clive is not a Luddite, but he is woefully ill-informed and is certainly in denial. As Susskind says of such naysayers:

Politely, it puzzles me profoundly that lawyers who know little about current and future technologies can be so confident about their inapplicability.

Read the book, Clive.

By Nick Holmes, 30 December 2008
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Dec

17

Twitter redux

Filed Under Twitter | 1 Comment 

In Twitter, the good the bad and the ugly James Mullan poses some of the questions many have in understanding - and extracting - the value of Twitter.

Perhaps I should … lower my expectations of what value I’m actually going to derive from Twitter. It is after all a Social Networking for individuals not for people working within a company so of course there are going to be frivolous and social tweets, so is it a case of just blocking or filtering these out using tools like Twhirl or Tweetdeck or organising my followers so I derive more value from the Tweets they are posting?

I’m a big fan of this whole social networking lark. It’s immensely exciting and full of even more promise than it has already fulfilled. But comment on it does rather get taken over by the services that (unpredictably) gain sufficient traction to hit the headlines and hence gain even more traction. And Twitter is IT now - the flavour of the moment. With (reputedly) 6 million registered users, in excess of 1 billion tweets posted so far and a recent offer from Facebook for the service of $1.5 billion, who can argue with the numbers?

But put the headlines aside and let’s look at it rationally. Twitter is a messaging service which enables you to post a minimalist profile (the primary means by which you can be found, so pay attention to it), broadcast short messages to your followers and tap into the message streams of those you choose to follow. It’s deceptively simple and it has many possible uses for lawyers (Bob Ambrogi suggests sixteen reasons).

Although many commentators refer to it as a microblogging service, that’s just geekspeak - and misleading geekspeak at that. It has almost nothing in common with blogging; sure it’s a platform for networking and conversation, but blogging is essentially about publishing comment and content which is precisely what you’re prevented from doing on Twitter. What you do with Twitter is chat or message in real time; your tweets are here today, gone tomorrow or sooner.

It has all the benefits Bob lists, so add it to your social networking arsenal. But see it for what it is and use it as it suits you.

By Nick Holmes, 17 December 2008
Filed under Twitter | 1 Comment 

Dec

12

What about clients?

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In a series of recent posts, Jordan Furlong gives his slant on the arguments at the heart of Richard Susskind’s thesis:

Decoupling price from cost in legal services:

In order to turn a profit, firms will be forced to streamline their costs of production, whatever they might be.

The market doesn’t care

clients don’t care if you make money … You have no right to make money from every problem or opportunity clients face.

The new leverage

This is the future of legal work, configured not to be an end in itself (a profit center for lawyers) but as a means to an end (better service for clients).

Now, don’t hastily jump on Jordan or Richard, or me for that matter; we’re only messengers.

And this reminds me, it’s a while since I perused WAC?

By Nick Holmes, 12 December 2008
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Dec

12

Barristers’ CPD - don’t panic

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In his inimitable style Geeklawyer trashes the need for CPD for barristers: “let’s bin the **** rubbish”.

That pending, he recommends using a cheap online CPD provider. I couldn’t agree more. By far the best value in town are the two current Legal Web ebooks with CPD which Delia Venables and I have compiled: each is £60 and qualifies for 5 hours; purchased together they cost £95 and qualify for 10 hours.

Like Geeklawyer, you can earn your CPD from your armchair, suitably festively fuelled.

By Nick Holmes, 12 December 2008
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Dec

10

The future of lawyers

Filed Under Future of law | 2 Comments 

I have not yet found on the public access web anything approaching a review of Richard Susskind’s The End of Lawyers? (Oxford University Press). So I must conclude I’m one of the few who have actually read it from cover to cover. To say I’ve read it is a bit of an exaggeration; I confess that several sections I have only skim-read; there is a lot of detail which certainly needs digesting but which can safely be left to a second reading.

Read on …

By Nick Holmes, 10 December 2008
Filed under Future of law | 2 Comments 

Dec

3

AustLII case law developments

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The good people at AustLII have been working on a citator for common law cases and the fruits of their labours can now be checked out at LawCite (Alpha).

LawCite is an international case citator and is the first product of a 3 year Australian Research Council funded project to research into automated systems for citation recognition. The LawCite database is generated on an entirely automatic basis with no editorial input and includes a fairly complete collection of all common law cases cited in the past decade plus most of the important uncited decisions before this. Please note that this is an Alpha version. It is still being built and refined and is being released for public comment only.

As well as using the search form, you can link directly to a LawCite result via a URL link in the following form
http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/LawCite?cit=[1963] 2 All ER 575

Recent standard neutral citations for UK cases don’t seem to be supported yet. According to Joe Ury, BAILII is currently working on its contribution to the project.

Also just launched is the CommonLII database of the English Reports (1220-1873), based on data provided by Justis. The reports are scans in PDF but are full text searchable.

Both projects were developed as part of an Australian Research Council Linkage grant concerning improvements to online case law involving seven industry partners including four courts and tribunals and two legal publishers.

By Nick Holmes, 3 December 2008
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Nov

7

Hard times?

Filed Under Legal practice | 2 Comments 

A personal opinion from a “usually tetchy but recently quite chipper old buzzard” on how the recession is affecting the legal world:

  • Personal Injury - times have never been better
  • Housing Law - good times!
  • Divorce - quiet time of year, but come January, credit crunch or no, its open season
  • Wills and Probate - dead as a dodo
  • Employment Law - busy as hell
  • Commercial Law - mergers, acquisitions, partnerships aplenty
  • Insolvency - booming sector
  • Conveyancing - pity the poor sods … this is as bad as anyone can remember

By Nick Holmes, 7 November 2008
Filed under Legal practice | 2 Comments 

Nov

7

Way to go Law Society Gazette

Filed Under Feeds, Law sites | Leave a Comment 

Must have been asleep or too busy these last few months to notice that the Law Society Gazette has morphed into a wonderful site:

Online the Gazette is as radically changed [as the print edition], with all sections of the magazine represented. Most importantly, each area of Gazette coverage is now easily accessible - we have flattened the site’s structure to make things easier to find, and the home page has everything we do right at the top of the page.

Yes, and it’s visually clean and very pleasing. Not only that, chums - and this is something you should make greater play of - you have also provided feeds for each of the main sections:

News

Opinion

Features

In Business

In Practice

Obiter

Brilliant stuff. Now all that’s needed is to add commenting for the opinion sections and subject feeds for your Law Reports and I’ll nominate you for Law Mag of the Year.

By Nick Holmes, 7 November 2008
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Nov

7

Blogging is normal - let’s move on

Filed Under Blogging | 3 Comments 

An article in this week’s Economist concludes:

Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers. Confirmed, however, is the idea that blogging is useful and versatile. In essence, it is a straightforward content-management system that posts updates in reverse-chronological order and allows comments and other social interactions. Viewed as such, blogging may “die” in much the same way that personal-digital assistants (PDAs) have died. A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone.

That blogging has gone mainstream may disappoint some early adopters who might have wished their turf to have remained unsullied. However, it was hardly unexpected. Put a useful technology out there and all sorts of people will find all sorts of uses for it. Remember the web itself circa 1995?

(Hat tip: John Naughton)

By Nick Holmes, 7 November 2008
Filed under Blogging | 3 Comments 

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