SOS on Susskind

30
Sep
2010

David McNamara

David McNamara, managing director of SOS comments on a recent interview published on Legal IT Professionals with Richard Susskind, consultant and author of ‘The End of Lawyers?’

Talking about his new paperback revision of ‘The End of Lawyers?’ first published 2008, in interviews on Legal IT Professionals, Richard Susskind compares how two or three years ago his focus was on persuading lawyers that they needed to change, whereas today it is all about equipping them with practical solutions to help make changes to their organisations. He says the more imaginative firms are looking further ahead at more radical business transformation. As I was reading the interviews, it reminded me just how progressive and imaginative some law firms have become and how many of them have transformed their firms to meet the challenges ahead.

I’ve come across many examples of mid-tier law firms who already recognised the need for business transformation 18 months to two years ago, if not longer. Many of these were looking ahead to the impact of the Legal Services Act and deciding to modernise, integrate and manage business processes more effectively; make information more readily available and deliver higher standards of customer service. These were not short-term measures to get through the recession but long term commitments to change and streamline working practices; to offer new on-line services to clients; introduce performance measurement and management and become more innovative and competitive. What makes this commitment to the future even more impressive is that this far-reaching business re-engineering has taken place during a recession.

In another part of the article Richard comments on how a law firm is really made up of distinct business areas or departments and as he says: “I've come quite firmly to the view that different parts of law firms have entirely different requirements,” and “They come together as one firm, but their own needs I think are quite diverging, very often.”

These comments confirm my own belief that law firms will need much more agile and flexible workflow solutions than in the past. Traditionally, workflow solutions have fallen into three distinct areas - case management, matter management and document management. In fact, most law firms require all these systems to satisfy every departments’ needs. Suppliers like SOS are now delivering all three products within a single unified system, providing firms with an infinite level of prescriptive and non-prescriptive functionality to support the entire business.

What’s more, where it has typically taken firms many months for each workflow to be tailored to firms’ needs before being rolled out department at a time, the future legal landscape will demand rapid workflow installations enabling firms to respond to changing workloads and clients’ needs on an on-going basis. Again workflow and business process agility will be key.

Another important criteria is seamless integration with the Windows desktop and Outlook in particular. With more and more legal work being carried out via email, then email management simply must form an integral part of any workflow/business process system. At SOS we have certainly worked long and hard at automating and thus removing the burden of handling and filing emails and attachments, away from the fee earner. Furthermore, the automatic time recording of emails and emailed work also addresses the serious issue of time leakage that firms without such a system are increasingly experiencing.

By understanding the way that lawyers work and like to work, a good supplier can help practice directors gain buy-in from partners, fee earners and support staff when implementing new solutions. This helps with speeding up the return on investment and in achieving business transformation goals in reasonable timescales.

While Richard believes that the legal profession is slow to embrace technology, he paints a picture where “some innovative firms tend to invest earlier and tend to benefit from these earlier investments and others catch up.” He also says it is never too late for others to act but with the caveat that the liberalisation of the market and the influx of new players, may indeed indicate that they need to act sooner rather than later.

In comparison to the way that Richard talks about law firms in the generality, I can clearly see that some law firms really are ahead of the curve. And as much as I’d like to think that SOS is responsible for some of these, I know that software is only a tool and it takes people with insight and foresight to choose and wield the right tool for the job. An increasing number of law firms certainly now fit into that category, and I’d like to think that Richard Susskind would applaud their imagination and innovation too.