The legal profession has a reputation as something of an
IT backwater, where tradition lords over innovation. Law firms now
appear to be leading the way, both in
their use of advanced technology, and in terms of the stringent
regulatory requirements they impose on IT contracts.
A quick scan of recent deals proves the point. Earlier this
month, international law firm
Eversheds signed a five-year, £27m deal with Computacenter, in
part to consolidate its European datacentres. About the same time,
another global player,
Clifford Chance, announced an offshoring programme in India
that included a £10m investment in IT.
Research from Kew
Associates, in association with Computer Weekly, also showed
that investment in IT from business services, which includes legal
firms, was increasing by 7.8% a year according to figures from the
first quarter of this year. This would make the sector the most
rapidly growing non-governmental investor in IT.
Malcolm Simms, IT director at Eversheds, said the legal sector
was maturing in its approach to IT. The tipping point for Eversheds
came when Simms won buy-in from the board for the five-year
outsourcing deal with Computacenter.
"By outsourcing with Computacenter, we get a new investment in
datacentres across two sites, which is a major step forward for the
back end, and a change from the distributed computing we were
doing. You could say it was a bit of a catch-up, but now we will
have datacentres that are up there with the best," he said.
It is not just savings and improved service in infrastructure
and support that Eversheds seeks in its deal with Computacenter.
Although it transferred 79 IT staff to the service partner,
Eversheds is also retaining an in-house IT team to improve the law
firm's competitiveness.
The firm has been piloting a
new case-management system based on Microsoft Outlook,
integrated with Microsoft Sharepoint servers. With a company-wide
roll-out due later this year, Simms predicted that the new system
would be eyed enviously by other law firms.
The trend towards commoditisation of legal services is driving
innovation in IT, Simms said. "I joined a group of equity partners
recently and they were talking about the commoditisation of the
legal profession. You have got to get the best lawyers doing the
best law. In years to come, every type of law will become a type of
commodity.
"Firms that can capture that first are going to be the most
successful. IT is going to be a big part of people being able to do
that."
Changing working practice within law firms to get the most out
of new application investment is a challenge, Simms said. "New
lawyers want more IT, whereas the older generation of lawyers
cannot live without paper. However, at the executive level, they
are seeing the value of IT investment."
This pattern is nothing new. Tiffani Bova, research director at
analyst firm Gartner, said US law firms that pioneered
document-management systems a decade ago met some difficulties with
end-users.
"There was a huge resistance to change and an enormous amount of
suspicion that technology could do anything better than pen and
paper and a secretary. There was also a lot of caution around
confidentiality," she said.
Richard Edwards, senior research analyst at the Butler Group,
said UK-based law firms had been behind their US counterparts in IT
investment, but were now catching up.
UK-based Clifford Chance, the largest law firm in the world, is
now using a 45,000-square-foot shared service centre in Delhi, run
by IT servics provider Integreon.
The law firm said it was the biggest offshoring project in the
sector and would create about £9m in savings.
Amanda Burton, director of global business services at Clifford
Chance, said, "In the nearly two years we have worked with
Integreon, we have also been impressed by their high level of
physical and data security."
Edwards said that law firms would bring new international
standards to commonplace IT strategies such as offshoring, because
of stringent regulatory requirements. More law firms were seeking
certification for information security standards, such as ISO 27000
(formerly BS7799), because they saw it as an advantage in winning
clients.
In their use of technology too, law firms could begin to lead
innovation with the transition from search to discovery technology,
Edwards said. "Search" users sort more information on a subject
they are already aware of, while "discovery" users are given
information they were not aware of but should be.
Because discovery is enshrined in litigation, the legal
profession had a pressing need for the technology to speed up this
process, Edwards said.
Far from having an antiquated approach to technology investment,
law firms are now well placedto take advantage of new technologies
and are leading business in using IT to improve information
governance.
The importance of
secure offshoring >>
KEW Associates/Computer
Weekly IT Expenditure Benchmarking Service >>
Eversheds >>
Clifford Chance
>>
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