ILTA13 has been and gone and it was a long but a highly enjoyable week. For me the best thing about ILTA is that it brings together not just technologists but legal practitioners too. This makes the conference more than just your usual Legal IT tech conference but also an educational experience. I can’t list all the super clever people I spoke to last week but needless to say it’s the people that make it the conference that it is.
I spend a lot of my time looking at trends from outside legal and how they may be applied to a law firm. I wanted to highlight a number of technology areas and trends that I have seen an increase in discussion around this year. These were more noticeable at ILTA compared to last year, not just through the sessions I attended, but also through the discussions I had and the tweets I followed.
The future
It was refreshing that there was great deal of discussion around the future of law firms and legal technology.
The keynote on day one was delivered by Scott Klososky of Future Point of View and he talked about many things including digital darwinism and technology inflection points. He drew links between law firms and companies like Borders and Kodak who ultimately went bankrupt because they couldn’t keep up with the demands of their clients. It is important to recognise the importance of technology in driving change but not to forget the processes and more importantly the people.
Day two’s keynote was delivered by Rohit Talwar and for me the most important section of his impressive talk was what law firms need to focus on to survive, and the strategic and technology challenges associated with delivering against these objectives. You can read more details about both of these keynotes here (Key1) and here (Key2) which are great summaries by Mary Abraham.
Some food for thought: how are these challenges being addressed in your firms? Are you focusing on the outsourcing of talent or are you driving value from the inside?
What to do about Sharepoint?
Traditional thinking within legal for a number of years has been that Sharepoint can do everything. Obviously this isn’t true but many firms employ the platform in a number of guises including intranet, extranet, website, DMS and many others. I’m not saying it doesn’t do some of these things well, but I am saying that it takes a lot of effort (and money) in order for them to succeed.
There is trend outside of legal to leverage Sharepoint for fewer things, as they have recognised that other platforms (including SaaS) can be better augmented into to your practices and integrated into your lawyers’ daily routines. The buy vs build question has been raised many times. Will Caraher mentioned in his TED-style talk in SPEC5 that law firms had the wrong development priorities and that too much effort and money was being ploughed into SharePoint to make it a success.
Something to consider. Will there be less Sharepoint development being conducted in-house in law firms in the years to come? Are law firms best positioned to build their own intranets or collaboration platforms?
Demand for more/improved online services
One of the consistent messages we hear is the need to provide clients with the services and value they are demanding online. Mobility and accessibility are key and something we have been focusing on at HighQ. Scott Rechtschaffen from Littler during his TED-style session talked about the challenges of delivering an internal presentation to associates about the changes in law. I loved his analogy of asking associates if they would buy flight tickets if they couldn’t complete the transaction or check-in online, and then, by contrast, asking them what is so special about delivering and buying legal services.
Another session addressing this broad topic was ‘Innovative online legal products for clients’, covered by David Hobbie in his Caselines blog. In essence, this was about enabling key online access points to important information and people. During one of Ron Friedmann’s talks he mentioned the potential requirement of doing ‘less law’ by either delivering legal services via a public facing system or client facing document automation or by working with GC’s and defining what the law firm should be delivering.
Online services are an important talking point whether they are a new revenue stream, a bespoke app or a value-added service. Client demands in this area are driving law firms to think beyond delivering legal advice via a paper format. Littlers use of NeotaLogic is a great example of this. Another important discussion was the importance of user experience in the delivery of these services.
How are you coping with the demand for better online services and solutions?
I thought I’d finish off by sharing a couple of really useful posts and pages about the conference.
A quick final thanks to the conference organisers, the speakers and attendees for making Vegas more than a roll of the dice. See you next year in Nashville.
