ILTA in the Nordics - Legal IT by design!

16
Sep
2013

Joanna Goodman

ILTA's first Nordic event in Copenhagen was hosted by Stefan Winquist , CIO at Bech-Bruun and attended by delegates from Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish firms. There were familiar faces from the UK too. The meeting was chaired by Gareth Ash, CIO at Allen & Overy, who is ILTA's regional vice president for Europe. The keynote by well-known legal IT consultant Neil Cameron raised some serious points.

His fundamental message was that market liberalisation and technology advances are transforming legal services and firms need to recognise that they really do have to change in order to survive and this meant protecting their market share.

One strategy is to grow and/or merge. Apparently, 80% of law firms responding to a survey question on this topic thought that they were likely to merge and that they would be the acquiring firm! Cameron is advising on IT issues around mergers - and demergers. Another strategy is to extend your services beyond legal advice. A third solution, which can be combined with the first two, is to use technology to protect your market share. Cameron's suggestions included:

• Brick wall your client base by allowing clients into your systems - put your icon on their desktops;
• Re-examine the fundamentals of how you package and price legal services by developing and managing efficient processes and workflows;
• Beautify your firm to make it an attractive investment - but not too much!

Presentations by Patrick Hurley from Thomson Reuters and Gareth Thomas from Tikit offered practical responses to some of the hot topics discussed by Cameron.  These global vendors are developing new solutions to help firms manage multiple applications (from different suppliers), platforms and user experiences while focusing sharply on building and leveraging client relationships.

User experience is a critical success factor - the one that means people within the firm will actually use the tools and technology that their CIO has chosen to invest in. IT consumerisation and BYOD - bring your own device - have led to expectations that enterprise technology will be as intuitive and user-friendly as consumer technology and the best vendors are developing products designed with that in mind.

The highlight for me was the presentation by Bob Schukai (picture), global head of mobile technology at Thomson Reuters, which was delivered via Google Glass. Mobile is this year's hot topic and Schukai's Google Glass presentation gave us a glimpse into the next big thing in mobile - wearable technology! Everyone was captivated as the images from his Google Glass appeared on the screen behind him.  It was certainly a change from the usual PowerPoint - or even Prezi - and some of us even got to try it on!

Schukai highlighted the shift from work-life balance to work-life blur and the importance of building integration into app designs so that users can move seamlessly between applications, platforms and devices.  Taking the easy integration between smartphones, tablets and the desktop a few steps further, he referenced Pebble and of course Google Glass.  He envisaged more firms making use of big data analysis to reduce risk, in the way that Juristat uses open data to predict litigation outcomes.

Finally, there was an interactive discussion on IT optimisation and how closely Nordic firms' approach matched the direction of their UK counterparts who faced competition from market entrants from other sectors.

One point that emerged from the debate was that although legal sector in the Nordics is not deregulated in the same way as it is in the UK , firms face the same pressure from clients to deliver more for less, and compete with local, regional and international firms and they are keen to use technology as a differentiator.  A partner at commercial boutique IUNO who attended the event invited me to the firm's offices where the virtual receptionist and custom-made Skype phone booth were two ways of blending technology that saves time and money with cool Nordic style.