The expanding realm of IT

By Jan Durant, IT director, Lewis Silkin

I wonder how many secret IT rebels lurk within the walls of our law firms, who would concur with Ogden Nash’s insightful quote: “Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.”
When I was considering how IT can be used to improve the lawyer’s?working life – and sometimes increase profitability – I did wonder if there are any surviving lawyers who do not use IT to some extent. I’m sure everyone has at least substituted typewriters for word processing and slide rules for calculators by now. I also wondered how we could really quantify this as most of the systems we use in law firms now are taken for granted.
Of course, Information Technology on desktops in law firms was first embraced when word processing arrived, and when the benefits were obvious. Some law firms had up to three secretaries per fee-earner to cope with document production. Word processing was a must-have. Vast chunks of documents could be recycled at will, and computers could happily sit on the secretaries’ desks in place of typewriters, and as long as the secretaries understood the things, there was no problem at all. And then PCs appeared on solicitors’ desks – in most cases so that solicitors could do their own time recording. For the stalwarts that still preferred to fill in timesheets, the arrival of the PC may have been delayed until the advent of e-mail.
But what else has IT given us so far? I am a firm believer in leveraging what we already have to its fullest extent before we put in even ‘bigger and better’ solutions. We should be thinking about what’s already out there – that is what most law firms already have in place, or already have on their IT shopping list, before looking to purchase much of the other great stuff, which is available, but at a cost.
For those of us old enough to recall the bad old days, remember the nightmare that ensued when we mislaid our paper diary? Even worse, how long did it take to arrange a meeting between more than two people? What about when you had to get to the office to be available to your clients by telephone? Worst of all, what about when the paper file was lost and you had to contact everyone involved in the case and beg for photocopies? If this is still the case, you need to talk to your IT director about putting in scanning so you can recreate that file electronically.

Going paperless
Some law firms have a paperless policy as far as filing is concerned – client or matter-centric electronic filing is definitely the way to go. A popular myth is that the Law Society guidelines say lawyers have to keep everything in paper form, but this is not true. Electronic data can be backed up and will always be available even in the event of a disaster – this is not true of paper. It would be very difficult to prove an e-mail had been sent by looking at a paper printout of it, as it has no ‘metadata’ – a print-out of an email can be easily forged. If a law firm truly goes paperless, think not only of the time spent filing those pieces of paper, the cost of the paper and toner, the cost of the files themselves, but the office space to be saved where the filing cabinets sit. And when the matter is complete, and the files are sent offsite, there’s that nasty invoice that regularly arrives for housing the closed matter files for up to 15 years. Electronic storage isn’t without cost, but year on year the cost decreases – unlike with paper storage. This also applies to deeds and original signed documents. Although these do have to be stored in paper form, they are mostly retrieved to be examined. If they were scanned before being sent offsite, there is a huge potential cost saving on retrievals.
So much of the IT used in law firms today is regarded in the same way as electricity - it usually just switches on and works. There have been immense cost savings already. Some of us have leveraged, to varying extents, what is already in place, but in the medium term I believe there will be huge cost savings to come, and the way law firms run will change as a result of what technology offers us.

Outsourcing options
One benefit is cutting costs and knowing where those costs are. Those of us who have digital dictation in place must realise that someone sitting in Darlington or Durban can reproduce that dictation far more cost-effectively than someone sitting at a desk in central London, Leeds or Manchester. Those people at desks in expensive central city office space surely should be adding more value than doing vast amounts of typing. Isn’t the way ahead for law firms to have their valuable secretaries doing everything but giving legal advice, so the lawyer can do what they do best and not have to deal with administrative matters?
We had an unexpected win when we implemented digital dictation at Lewis Silkin seven years ago. Rather than just showing us which secretaries were most productive, the statistics highlighted that two similarly qualified solicitors in the same department were producing at the one extreme, a single figure amount of dictations per month, and at the other, well into the hundreds. When the information was supplied to the relevant partner in that department, it was quickly realised one fee-earner was not making good use of their secretary and wasting valuable chargeable time doing all the typing, while the other was dictating one line attendance notes that should have been short notes in their time-recording software. We were also able to reallocate secretarial resource according to who were the heavier users of dictation.

Recovering costs
Cost-recovery software can be another way of increasing profitability. These can be either software or hardware-based systems that are attached to photocopiers or scanners, or which capture at the point of printing from Word and export to the finance system when printing is captured as a disbursement. Some law firms charge for copying, faxing, printing, and even scanning, but some do not. Some do fixed-cost work where this is included in the fees. But at least with cost-recovery software we know how much the cost of a matter was to the firm in terms of paper etc. – even if we don’t bill it. If these costs on a matter are not captured, especially in a paper-heavy litigation case, it is a real possibility the profit could be swallowed up by paper costs.
Allowing your user base to work remotely is another quick win for both worker and employer. I don’t know of any law firms that have a hot-desking policy (i.e. when one desk is shared between several people), but those who allow people to work from home save on office space while giving people with families flexibility and the chance to spend travelling time doing something more interesting. BT has had a remote-working policy for many years, and says it found productivity improved, rather than deteriorated, when the remote workers were trusted to do the task. Lewis Silkin’s experience echoes this, especially on the secretarial front. It should also be borne in mind that legislation gives people the legal right to ask to work flexibly.

Managing know-how
As far as know-how is concerned, we are using our document-management system as a know-how repository, rather than purchasing another piece of software, but we have put a powerful enterprise search engine in place on top of this. We have added extra fields to documents identified as ‘good’, which can then be edited by our know-how guardians.
Document-assembly software can quickly provide a huge return on investment. For example, if sufficient time is invested in creating a Share Purchase Agreement, with all the various options, this can save large amounts of lawyer time later as a paralegal can repeatedly reproduce a legal document that would normally take a qualified lawyer hours to draft. Obviously the question that then arises is would you be able to make the moral case to charge the client what you would have charged them before the technology was in place? I wonder if the result of more widespread adoption of this technology in the future will produce more fixed-cost or flat-fee matters?
I was recently chatting to a few tame litigators who remember how it was in the ‘good olde days’ when lawyers would send each other boxes of papers to look at. They are unanimous in the view that in one respect, the fact they have to check out all the e-mails has increased their workload; there is exponentially more information available. Obviously there are also more tools available for them with which to disseminate this data, but the fact remains they still have to read everything – a machine cannot exercise legal judgment. I am told from a litigation point of view that the discovery tools available have probably given everyone a far more level playing field. There is more information available now than there was previously. In the old days this was the privilege of the wealthy and well-resourced lawyer. Nowadays any high-street practice with internet access and a subscription to a suitable online repository of precedents or legal know-how can compete with the larger firms. Litigation-support systems do not need to be purchased – they can be ‘hired’. Of course, the benefit of this is that the full cost can be charged back to the client as a disbursement, and using a litigation-support system will obviously save lawyer time, thereby reducing client costs.
E-learning is another way life can be made easier. This is obviously not suitable for all training, but for certain pieces of training – for example the new Solicitors’ Code of Conduct – learning in this way saves trainer time and allows lawyers to educate themselves as and when is convenient.
Many organisations are now also looking at Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to replace telephoning. This is commonly perceived as a way of saving money on telephone bills, which it is. But if moving into new offices, it’s far more cost effective to implement and maintain than to implement the old-fashioned PBX system. In addition to lowering telephone costs, once established as the internal telephone system VoIP gives remote workers more functionality than is available with the traditional office-based PBX system, so the remote worker can make and receive calls via the internet. An added benefit is that it’s seamless to clients who won’t know where their lawyer is calling from.
Several firms have invested in making information visible to clients and other parties in a matter via an extranet. An extranet is a private network that uses the internet to securely share whatever information systems a firm wishes. This will largely consist of documents, but some firms choose to publish work in progress, and very brave firms publish lawyers’ calendars. Some firms make know-how available via an extranet free of charge as a value-add for their clients, and some use it as a revenue stream by charging for know-how made visible in this way.
All that said I believe the biggest cost savings and efficiencies will come from workflow systems. These are the automation of business procedures during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another in a way that is governed by rules or procedures. Many firms’ first attempt at this is new-business inception. The entire process will be streamlined, leaving no room for error and without duplication of input.
Yes, if all goes according to plan, the lawyers will be replaced by know-how systems that can think; the business-services areas will be replaced by workflow systems that don’t make mistakes, in fact the law firm of the future could comprise a huge IT department running it all (if you don’t outsource us to India in the meantime!)

Jan Durant is director of IT at Lewis Silkin LLP. She can be contacted at jan.durant@lewissilkin.com