Horizon scanning - the view from ILTA INSIGHT 2010

The crystal balls were out last week as the theme of this year’s ILTA (International Legal Technology Association) one day conference in London was Foresight 20:20. Who better to open the conference than forward-looking avowed Mac user and A&O Senior Partner David Morley.

David identified the technology to look out for as: data clouds and virtualisation, business applications developed on social network lines and even more portability. David predicts that globalisation is inevitable (more than two thirds of A&O’s matters involve two or more countries and 60% of its revenue is from outside the UK) and therefore competition will hot up further. Firms in China for instance have grown to Silver Circle size in less than 10 years and “Tesco law” is not far away. Increased competition drives efficiency and David sees firms having a decision to make about whether to be high end and bespoke or whether to exploit technology (particularly automation and self service) to take on the opposition directly on cost.

The rest of the conference expanded on the keynote theme and explored the technology choices we are making now or will be in the future. MS Office 2010 is due out in May. Up to now most firms have shyly stayed at least one version of a Microsoft product behind the rest of the world. Many are now considering leapfrogging Vista and Office 2007 and moving straight to MS Office 2010.

Radically, one firm, Bradford and Barthel LLP, has switched over to Google Apps. All client files are now up there in the clouds (or rather down there dispersed amongst a myriad of bits on a server farm in the Nevada desert) and matters can be worked on by many lawyers at once, securely and remotely, on a variety of different devices (be it Windows 7 PC’s, thin client terminals, iPads, Blackberrys or Droids) and communicating real time using video chat. It seems collaboration is the name of the new game and Microsoft’s own offerings are equally impressive; MS Office Communications Server (OCS) and Sharepoint linking up lawyers and their documents.

Collaborative working will mean less resource used; less printing and less duplication; and will ultimately encourage the advent of a virtual desktop machine that is the size of an actual apple and uses hardly any power at all. There is of course some concern about vendor risk, data protection and ownership to sort out (which zeroes and ones in cyberspace fall within which jurisdiction?). Those hungry servers taking up office space right now could soon be banished to a solar powered water cooled bunker on an Oxfordshire airbase. If you want to know more, Linklaters have had Citrix for 12 years and probably know more about the benefits and the pitfalls of virtualisation than most. If there’s sufficient interest, maybe we’ll get them to tell us how they do it.

Collaboration is also helping firms to reduce travel. Accenture saved $20m (and a lot of CO2) on flights in a year by switching to Telepresence, OCS, Sharepoint and Roundtable as a package. Alright they spent a fortune, but imagine this: of their 55 million minutes a month of internal calls, 15 million are audio conferences on OCS. There are 75,000 employees on their corporate facebook page each with their skill sets laid out and whether they are online right and available to consult. If you think this sounds gimmicky, just think about how quick Instant Messenger or SMS are compared to email. Imagine the cross selling benefits if clients of law firms had access to know-how across a global network instantly.

As part of a monumental project to drag the court service into the 20th century - Nigel Kelly, Programme Manager of HMCS, is enabling law firms and the public to file court documents online. Many commercial courts now allow users to file online forms, 24/7 right up to midnight deadlines. All you need is an email address and Adobe 9 - send a note to getforms@justice.gsi.gov.uk with the number of the form in the subject line and you’re away. Total response time is six minutes. Going forward it should be incumbent on all firms – in fact it should be an LSA pledge - to file to any of these courts in future using online forms. Reynolds Porter Chamberlain has already made it mandatory for all cases in these courts, whilst in Singapore every legal matter begins online!

The future, then, is one of slicker law being done at light speed by multitasking multimedia savvy lawyers. They’ll probably still work all the hours God sends mind you, but they’ll use up quite a lot less of our planet’s resources doing so.

INSIGHT 2010 is a one day conference for the legal technology fraternity held annually in London by ILTA (International Legal technology Association). Anyone from a member law firm can register to attend free of charge.

Stacey Collins is a Health, Safety and Environment manager at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP