What’s new?

As you might expect, being a journalist I don’t consider my powers of analysis to be above indulging in a little innocent eavesdropping from time to time.

And on one especially arduous recent commute I was intrigued to hear two well-heeled gentlemen discussing a topic you may be quite familiar with by now. The 2009 recession and hoped-for speedy recovery.

Accepting the nervous credit markets and eager new regulators, however, returning to strong growth from this downturn would be hampered by a further factor, the pair postulated. Simply put, in this age of the mature internet, there is no space sufficiently large left to innovate. As one put it (in a truly tiny nutshell), there is nothing really new to do.

Of course many, and certainly the current Labour government, will find this a fairly simple statement to rebuff. They will quickly direct our attention to the more secure and equal society promised by investment in a sustainable low-carbon economy and ‘Digital Britain’, and the many new jobs and businesses such endeavours will entail.

Nevertheless, the cynic in me was willing to give the thought at least a little more breathing space. Now that we can fly anyway in the world, choose from a thousand channels to entertain ourselves, and purchase pretty much anything, from anywhere, at the click of a button, is future progress just a case of managing to do these things faster, cheaper and more frequently? Can the depth of innovation in the ‘small world’ 21st Century possibly keep pace with the vast leaps forward and gathering forces of globalisation that so dominated the previous one?

Some may, perhaps, also point to a ‘revolution’ underway in communications that is social networking, and the impact this will have on the business landscape. That we will be as lost without our Facebook or LinkedIn account as we already feel on losing our mobile phones or internet access. Will Web 2.0 networking come to be as basic a necessity as Lord Carter’s Digital Britain deems decent broadband access to be?

Interestingly, US-based organisation the Global Language Monitor recently welcomed ‘Web 2.0’ as the millionth legitimate word or phrase to enter the English language. The fact the term had been found over 25,000 times in searches, and was generally in wide use, were the benchmarks for inclusion.

Other linguists were largely scornful of the exercise. All language is constantly morphing and any official count is arbitrary, they argued. Nevertheless, Web 2.0 is certainly a concept of the moment, with hundreds of articles now regularly debating the pros and cons of posting our thoughts into the public domain. The latest horror story is that a US blogger is now planning to sue search giant Google after it revealed her identity to a case in the Manhattan Supreme Court, while US marketing firm Pear Analytics has been in the press for a study finding that 40 per cent of all Twitter posts are little more than “pointless babble”. Just 8.7 per cent of ‘tweets’ were deemed to include valuable ‘news’ content, with almost ten per cent classed as pure ‘self-promotion’, whether personal or business-related.

Also making it into the five words leading up to the millionth is the voguish concept of ‘Cloud Computing’. It's a topic we touch on in this issue in the context of law firms outsourcing services to reduce costs (p 16). Malcolm Simms, formerly IT director at Eversheds, has just launched K-Cloud in this space, looking to offer smaller law firms (and budgets) cost-effective access to a wide range of IT services and updates from a single internet platform.

For Web 2.0, the jury still seems to be out. Is it a genuine forum for knowledge-sharing and valuable ‘citizen’ journalism, or just another channel to an increasingly competitive and complicated market?

Here at Managing Partner this hovering question mark hasn’t prevented us launching our own LinkedIn group, however. Do please join us. I really hope that debate generated over the coming months will inform our editorial coverage and vice versa. Tell us what’s new at each of your practices and firms.

Of course, I am equally happy to be contacted at the good, old-fashioned rbrent@ark-group.com.

Richard Brent, Editor

Features

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Out of sight? Free
Offshoring legal work overseas at a lower cost requires even more stringent management, but the savings seen could prove increasingly persuasive as the legal landscape continues to shift.

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