Editor’s foreword

In a renewed spring effort to get out and about, I recently attended the International Legal Technology Association’s (ILTA) inaugural UK event for law-firm IT professionals.

The one-day conference included presentations from a range of law firms from the US, UK and Canada, with time included for more informal discussion between delegates and speakers on IT issues facing the legal profession today.

With IT departments now a well-established phenomenon in law firms large and small, it was interesting to see that the first question for the day would be ‘does IT matter?’ With all the money law firms have invested in technology in recent years, the most obvious response would be ‘well, it better matter’, but it turned out that there were more angles to this seemingly simple question than one might at first assume.

Speakers Janet Day (Berwin Leighton Paisner), Matt Kesner (Fenwick & West), Doug Caddell (Foley & Lardner) and Chris White (Ashurst) agreed that the potential value of IT is often undermined by the attitude of lawyers. Few lawyers, for example, would appreciate the potential role of technology in winning client pitches. Among the audience, a few delegates claimed to have been invited to attend a pitch, but the concept of a beauty parade including an IT professional is still largely unheard of. As White said, lawyers still view a client win on the basis of how well they can sell their legal knowledge. In a competitive environment, where most firms can boast technical expertise, however, areas such as technology might become an important, but as yet underestimated, differentiator for clients.

Apart from winning clients, the conference also emphasised the valuable role of technology in risk management. With increasing regulation surrounding the storage and retrieval of information, firms are working hard to implement the right management systems for compliance.

But there is also an educational task in getting lawyers to change the way they work. Speakers Heather McCallum and Sam Suri of Allen & Overy described a trend among clients asking more sophisticated questions about the storage of confidential client information. Model answers could be highly technical, but there are a myriad of potential problems that go beyond storage mechanisms. For instance, many lawyers deal with documents that contain metadata (amendments, comments or deletions, for instance), but they do not realise that third parties could also view these details, as they cannot be seen obviously on screen. Unknowingly distributing such sensitive information could pose innumerable problems for the lawyer concerned. In addition, lawyers may traditionally have included a clause in a client contract that states that all documents relating to a matter will be destroyed. Lawyers need to know that electronic documents cannot be destroyed in this way, and amend their contracts accordingly.

In many of the discussions, the key issues were cultural with a gulf continuing to prevail between the way lawyers think and work, and typical business practices today. Getting the most out of technology, while meeting regulations and sophisticated client expectations requires a re-think among lawyers about how they approach business. IT professionals can provide much of the impetus for change in terms of effective training and educational activities, but the real key to success will lie, as ever, with senior management. Unless the management buys in to change and supports firm-wide activities across non-legal functions, it is unlikely law firms as a whole will ever realise the true value of any business function, whether it be IT, marketing, knowledge/information management or HR.

Caroline Poynton
Editor

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