Headlines

Cameron aims to offer ‘liquid’ consultancy
Neil Cameron, who for the best part of a decade dominated the UK legal IT consultancy scene, is back with a new venture that aims to build a substantial consulting enterprise through organic growth. This week Cameron and fellow independent consultants Jill Bazalgette, Mike Fisher, Clive Morris and Tim Travers, launch the Neil Cameron Consulting Group "with a shared vision of providing independent and indispensable added value advice to professional service firms and other knowledge-based organisations, in particular, law firms."

The new business is already advising such enterprises on the complete life cycle of their information technology and business services requirements - its objective is to exemplify best practice by taking a strategic, business-driven approach to technology and adding value by innovation. Commenting on the venture, Cameron said "The time for a loose association is over. Law firms are crying out for a single source of multi-disciplinary complementary skills that they can turn to for opinionated and independent advice. Nowadays this is just as likely to be ad hoc advisory work at key stages of a firm's strategic exploitation of new systems and working practices, which we like to call liquid consulting, as it is the old-style system procurement. The key words are Best Practice: Strategy Technology Innovation."
http://www.neilcameronconsulting.com

Susskind uncovers the Hub club
Writing in his column in this week's Law section of The Times newspaper, the well known legal IT guru Richard Susskind has revealed the existence of a new legal technology initiative by nine major investment banking groups, including Deutsche Bank and Barclays Capital. The objective is to agree IT standards for the electronic delivery of legal services, so their inhouse legal departments will eventually only have access one system, rather than the present situation where one bank may face separate login and operating requirements for as many as 200 different law firm extranets and virtual deal rooms.

The first project, which will involve the participation of four of the UK's magic circle firms - Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Freshfields and Linklaters but not Slaughter & May - plus Simmons & Simmons, which has had a long time commitment to e-commerce through its Elexica online service, will be to develop a single point of access information and knowledge portal for inhouse lawyers.

Susskind does however warn that one possible weakness with this 'Hub club' concept is that it "would surely suffer from interminable delays and debate" if too many law firms were invited to collaborate in developing the system, not least because law firms traditionally "find it difficult to cooperate on IT" matters. Susskind's own suggestion is that it would be better for the hub to be provided by a third party such as a legal publisher - LexisNexis and Thomson/Westlaw spring to mind - that already has proven expertise in implementing global systems, content delivery and the associated security issues. And why not, after all Reuters made the same leap from content provider to a global financial information platform in the 20th Century?

Scottish law society has to pay for URL
The Law Society of Scotland has backed down on its long-running fight with alleged cyber-squatter Tommy Butler over the ownership of the Lawscot.co.uk domain name and last week - spookily on Friday 13th June - sent him a cheque for £10,000 for the URL. One year previously the Society rejected Mr Butler's offer to sell them the name for just £500 on the grounds that he was asking too much.

As the Insider has reported in previous issues, the dispute blew up when the Society started using the Lawscot name without realising that it was already registered to Mr Butler, who at that time was working on a legal directory project. Once the dispute turned legal, Mr Butler initially had great difficulty finding any law firm in Scotland that would be prepared to act for him and says the money - which he argues is purely a payment for the domain name and not a settlement of his dispute with the Scottish Law Society - will be used to fund negligence actions against two firms of solicitors as well as a compensation claim against the Law Society.

Digital dictation case study now on the web
The Legal Technology Insider web site's case studies & white papers facility now has a new report on Wedlake Bell's experiences with their new BigHand digital dictation system. How do firms address some of the cultural and technical issues - including what happens to the paper files - associated with implementing a digital dictation roll-out? The paper can be downloaded free of charge as a PDF file.
http://www.legaltechnology.com

Digital court conference in Leeds
Our thanks to David Riggall of Rose & Bridge Associates for drawing our attention to the proceedings on The 21st Century Digital Court Conference which took place at the end of May in the Court 21 facility at Leeds University's Department of Law. Speakers included Lord Justice Henry Brooke, Professor Clive Walker from Leeds University, Matthias Kelly QC, the chairman of the Bar and Professor Fred Lederer, from the William & Mary School of Law in Williamsburg, Virginia. The Court 21 venue is a UK sibling of Courtroom 21 in the United States, which is designed to facilitate the teaching and learning of the use of technology in the court room. Check out the web links for details of both the conference and Courtroom 21.
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/law/conf/court21.htm
http://www.courtroom21.net

Context & SCLR launch online Scottish case law service
Electronic publisher Context has reached agreement with the Scottish Council of Law Reporting (SCLR) to make the jurisdiction's most authoritative series of law reports available on the web for the first time. The Session Cases, which take precedence over all other law reports series used in Scottish courts, will be published as the Electronic Session Cases from October 2003 on Context's Justis.com online legal research service. With coverage starting in 1930, the Session Cases contain all the key appellate decisions, civil and criminal, from the Court of Session and High Court of Justiciary in Scotland, plus selected cases decided at first instance. Also included are all decisions on Scottish appeals to the House of Lords and the Privy Council. 
 
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This week’s big deals in brief

Top French firm goes with Elite
Elite's move into the Continental European market continues apace, with the announcement that one of the largest law firms in France - CMS Bureau Francis Lefebvre - has selected Elite to supply its new practice management system.

Benelux win for iManage
The largest independent law firm in the Benelux, NautaDutilh, is working with iManage and its partner ResSoft to implement iManage Worksite across the organisation. NautaDutilh is introducing a matter centric approach that will improve collaboration amongst client-focused professionals, communities, practice groups and offices. The firm purchased its licences, integration, implementation and support services from ResSoft and is using H2W Partners for project management.

Massive ROI claimed for Hummingbird implementation
According to an independent analysis conducted by Nucleus Research, the US law firm McGuireWoods achieved a 237% return on investment (ROI) on its deployment of the Hummingbord Portal 5 infrastructure. In order to quantify the ROI of McGuireWoods' investment in Hummingbird, Nucleus analyzed the costs of software, hardware, personnel, consulting, and training over a three year period. "The firm's main returns came from improved service opportunities enabled by the more cost-effective knowledge management processes and from the ability to better leverage attorney time for client service work," said Rebecca Wettemann of Nucleus. "Indirect benefits included increased productivity of administrative staff and IT personnel." The complete McGuireWoods ROI case study is available on the Hummingbird web site at: http://www.hummingbird.com/collateral/ss/mcguirewoods.html

Simpson & Marwick go best of breed
Scottish law firm Simpson & Marwick has opted for a 'best of breed' solution to replace its current practice and case management systems. Elite will be providing the PMS, while Solicitec will be providing the case and workflow management elements. Elite now has 12 law firm sites in Scotland, including 8 of the top 20 largest practices.

Four more firms sign up for DespatchBox secure email
With reports suggesting that some heavyweight competition is about to enter the secure email systems' market, one of the current lead players in the UK legal sector - DespatchBox - has just announced for more wins for its DDX email encryption software. The four new sites are Olswang, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Pinsents and DWF (Davies Wallis Foyster). DDX is also available through DespatchBox partner Tikit. DespatchBox are currently set to release the Enterprise Edition of DDX, which offers a range of additional functionality tailored specifically to the working practices of law firms. The new product includes infrastructure for a secure messaging network intended to create a standard for email encryption within the legal sector. Commenting on the move, Andrew Collier, Head of IT Systems at DDX users Nicholson Graham & Jones said "The secure messaging community proposed by DespatchBox would create a common standard, which will be needed as the demand for secure communications increases. The ability for firms to exchange encrypted emails without the needs for a costly PKI-style user authentication model will be an advantage."
 
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Special report

Lawyers really do not like technology
A new survey by Digital Message (020 8213 2100) one of the UK's largest suppliers of presentation and display equipment meeting rooms, lecture theatres, classrooms and training rooms, found that although 99% of them used PCs, nearly three quarters of lawyers admitted to not enjoying learning new software,.

The Digital Message technophobe survey was designed to expose true attitudes to technology within the legal profession and involved lawyers from firms including Slaughter & May, Linklaters and KLegal, as well as in-house legal teams. The results revealed a strong relationship between age and people's approach to new software. More than two thirds (67%) of the respondents said their dislike for learning new software packages began once they turned 40 and more than a third (35%) claimed this change in attitude just crept in. Being too busy (28%) and the lack of need to learn new technology for a period of time (22%) were the two most popular reasons given for the change in attitude creeping in.

As well as being averse to learning new software, a large percentage of lawyers have only a basic grasp of common packages such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Almost 80% said they used less than 40% of the functions of these packages. Nearly half (48%) occasionally start a piece of work on their PC but rely on colleagues to finish it because they struggle with the software. This lack of interest in technology is not just confined to the office. Nearly half (46%) of respondents admitted they could not programme their home video recorder and more than a third (39%) confessed to getting their children to help them with new technology.

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