Hot and here: New technologies to improve your firm's performance

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

This proverb by 19th-century French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr is an apt description of law firms’ approach to technology adoption. As always, it is driven by the basic motivations of desire for larger profit margins, greater efficiencies, better work product and higher client retention.

Some technology motivations remain constant, such as the need to improve knowledge management. What changes is that, from time to time, new ideas, technologies and software arise that get traction because they resonate with one or more of these basic motivations.

The technologies de jour are a mixture of personal productivity and enterprise profitability protection. This article will examine three of each that are becoming increasingly adopted in the legal market.

Personal productivity tools?

1. Paperless

Law firms originally went through the ‘paperless’ discussion over 30 years ago, when it was first mooted that new technologies would render old-fashioned paper redundant. It turned out that reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated.

However, more recently, the less ambitious concept of paperless has come into vogue, meaning that firms are setting the much more attainable objective of trying to use less paper, as opposed to trying to get rid of paper altogether.

Law firms not only pay money to buy paper, but they also incur significant additional costs when they print on it, copy it, store it and recycle it. Any reduction in the utilisation of paper can save law firms significant overheads, as well as allowing them to earn considerable corporate social responsibility or ‘green’ points.

It turns out that, if you remove the pressure of abolishing paper and put some basic initiatives in place instead, it becomes fairly easy to reduce its usage considerably. Many firms find that a good impetus for these initiatives is the office move: ‘offering’ lawyers the right incentives and then ‘offering’ them reduced file storage in the new offices.

There are three key elements to consider:?

a. moving from paper to digital records;

b. avoiding printing; and

c. printing smarter.

a. From paper to digital

This first concept involves activities that are aimed at transforming paper into digital format for future operations, which will reduce the volume of paper being managed, stored and archived in the office.

This can be achieved by proper use of email and document filing systems, by scanning information provided on paper, and by telling clients and other third parties that the firm would prefer to receive all materials electronically, if already available in that format.

In the longer term, there are significant advantages to reducing the firm’s stack of archived files that are a permanent drain on budgets by just sitting there and which cost even more when trying to recover them.

b. Avoiding printing

The next step is printing avoidance, i.e., persuading people not to print material unless absolutely necessary. Many draft documents are printed for proofing purposes only. While some lawyers believe that it is not possible to proofread documents on screen, there is evidence that – with the right equipment and training – it can be done.

With a second monitor capable of showing a document page in its full size and better proofing tools (such as those recently developed by LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters), inroads can be made in this area.

An even lower-hanging fruit is the knee-jerk reaction of most lawyers to print a copy of everything vaguely relevant in preparation for a meeting. Most of this material is not referred to and goes straight into the bin afterwards.

Much could be achieved in this instance by instituting ?two initiatives: ?

• making it easy to get access to materials for viewing in meeting rooms on personal devices like laptops, iPads ?and tablets; and

• developing a new meeting etiquette by which attendees are told in the Outlook meeting request which materials they do need to bring and which materials are either unnecessary, going to be provided by the organiser or will be available through presentation.

Another fruitful area under this heading would be that of monthly partner reports. Some of the distributed materials are on paper and some are electronic, but many get printed anyway. There are ways of delivering on-screen ‘dashboards’ which are more intelligible, interactive and useful than paper reports, and which could cut down the volume of paper utilised for partner reports.

The adoption of workflow technology often achieves paper reduction by automating the capture and flow of information that would otherwise be captured on written forms and disseminated physically. A good example of this is new client and matter intake systems, which automate much of the new business processes and do away with many forms.

c. Printing smarter

Finally, there is smarter printing, for those occasions when something simply has to be printed. When it does, the firm should ensure that it uses recycled paper wherever possible and offers both duplex printing options as well as the ability to print two or four digital pages onto a single physical page – which should be fine for drafts.

A related issue is the orienting of emails. All emails should be filed electronically by matter and ought not to be printed. But, if they are, tools such as Green Print can allow users to print just the latest email in a thread instead of the whole email history.

All of these initiatives are well suited to being piloted in one department or team and then fine tuned before being rolled out throughout the firm. As mentioned, an impending office move is always a good hook on which to hang such an exercise.

2. Matter costing and pricing

Lawyers do not have a good track record when it comes to estimating fees. This is awkward at the best of times, but even more important in an era of increasing demands for fixed fees and tight estimates.

Lawyers should first cost a job and then price it. But, in practice, they tend to conflate the two tasks, fail to learn from previous underestimates and then write off excess time on the final bill – money straight off the firm’s bottom line.¹

Clients want better management of fees to match estimates and they want transparency – ideally, a constantly-updated online indication of fees against budget by matter breakdown.

There are now excellent tools from Elite, Aderant and Redwood to assist partners in splitting up matters into constituent elements, undertaking complex ‘what-if’ calculations to gauge likely costs and also allowing the lawyers working on the matter to record time against those constituent elements.

This process allows partners managing matters to have much more control over the accumulation of fees and to keep them within agreed budgets, as well as to reveal fees against budget information to clients on secure extranets.

3. Smart time capture

The latest generation of time capture tools, available from many vendors, provide technology that can effectively ‘construct’ a draft timesheet by monitoring each fee earner’s phone calls, document creation and review activities, research tasks and Outlook appointments from his desktop, smartphone and/or other mobile device.

Such software can assist in the speedy, accurate and increased level of time recorded by fee earners, as well as in capturing the necessary backing information to sustain the billing of additional time.²

Once you get past the ‘big brother’ fear that some lawyers have about this, evidence shows that time capture software gets adopted fairly painlessly and really does increase billable time.

Enterprise initiatives

?1. Unified communications

Unified communications cover a range of technologies that provide an integrated messaging environment for lawyers, including tools that provide: ?

• ‘presence’ indication (where a user is and whether he ?is available);

• instant messaging (IM);

• video conferencing (one-to-one or one-to-many);

• ‘soft’ phones on computing devices;

• mobile phone integration;

• voicemail integration;

• collaboration; and

• single number access.?

Relevant technologies in this space include Microsoft’s Lync and Cisco’s Jabber.

This is an example of software that lawyers generally take to quite quickly and enthusiastically. They like the ability to easily start real-time document collaboration with internal or external teams via WebEx or other collaboration platforms. This would ?be done, for example, by right-clicking in an email distribution? list rather than having to schedule it in advance with the IT ?team in a boardroom.

Lawyers also like single number reach, unified voice messaging and the ability to use their iPads or laptops as ‘soft’ phones to make cheap calls from hotel rooms abroad.

2. Enterprise search

Lawyers often say that finding information – even if they know it exists – in their law firms’ systems (such as the intranet) is much more difficult than it should be. What they want is an internal Google-type search function.

Enterprise search systems aim to do this by offering a browser-based capability that enables lawyers to execute ?a query that can search all of a firm’s internal content, ?including emails, the document management system, the finance systems, the client relationship management system and the intranet.

These have been around for years, but what has changed recently is that a lot of research and development has been undertaken to make enterprise search systems easier to implement and use.

The latest ‘auto classification’ and ‘collection building’ functionality and revised enterprise system interfaces available from vendors like Autonomy, Recommind and BA Insight provide much more accurate and intelligible results to enterprise-wide queries, which often previously produced seemingly random collections of unstructured material.

3. BYOD

Bring your own device (BYOD) is the phenomenon of ?lawyers seeking to use their own modern gadgets for work purposes – a rare example of technology that is being ?‘pulled’ by lawyers, instead of being forcibly ‘pushed’ onto unwilling conscripts.

Unfortunately, when lawyers started turning up at their IT directors’ offices after Christmas with their new toys (iPhones, iPads or other tablets) a few years ago, they were immediately met with the big brush off.

It’s tragic really that some of us, having spent the best part of 30 years desperately trying to get lawyers to embrace new technology, told them to go away the first time they turned up actually asking, if not begging, to use a modern technological device in the office.

This happened because of two particular mantras in ?IT management:?

1. seek to minimise the number of devices that you manage on grounds of cost; and
2. non-standard devices are inherently insecure.

The clincher, in the end, was that some of these lawyers who wanted to use their own devices were very senior – and in the end they got their own way.

There are some additional costs attributable to this approach, but they have proven to be manageable. Suitable mobile device management software (such as Mobile Manager from Good Technology) can make user-owned devices just as secure as the good old work BlackBerry.

It is still early days, but we are starting to see a welcome revolution in the adoption of user-friendly portable devices by lawyers that can help to improve efficiency, client connectivity ?and collaboration.

Neil Cameron heads NCCG, a legal IT management consultancy, and has worked with law firms on their ?strategic adoption of technology for over 30 years ?(www.neilcameronconsulting.com)

?Endnote

1. See ‘Informed calculations’, Neil Cameron, Managing Partner, ?Vol. 15 Issue 2, October 2012

2. See ‘Clocking lawyers’, Neil Cameron, Managing Partner, ?Vol. 14 Issue 10, July/August 2012