Law firms that involve their IT directors in the policy-making process are reaping the benefits. Derek Bedlow reports on the results of the Legal Week Intelligence law firm technology survey

Technology, as IT guru Richard Susskind and others have been telling us for years, has the capacity to transform the way law firms do business, making them leaner, meaner organisations that are better able to respond to client needs and provide the working experience that their employees demand.

Yet while efficiency gains have been achieved, many of the fundamentals of legal practice remain much as they have ever been and legal technology has, so far, been deployed primarily to make traditional methods of doing things quicker. After so many false dawns, it is perhaps unsurprising that the combination of the words 'legal' and 'IT' have a glazing effect on the eyes of many law firm managers.

Consequently, many – although not all – IT directors continue to find themselves on the periphery, rather than at the centre, of their firms' strategic process. This is despite growing evidence that those firms that do involve their IT team in the policy-making process are reaping the benefits as their IT progresses from a back-office technical role to one that is at the forefront of law firm strategy.

This is perhaps the key finding of the most recent Legal Week Intelligence annual law firm technology survey, which canvasses the opinions of the most important end-users of legal technology – the lawyers – at the UK's 25 leading law firms. Fee earners were asked to evaluate both performance of their systems and applications and, more generally, the performance of their technology department and its contribution to the firm's strategy. More than 1,600 lawyers responded while, for comparison purposes, the same questions were also asked of 200 accountants at the UK's 'big four' accounting firms.

While the results of the survey suggest that most lawyers are moderately happy with the day-to-day performance of their IT systems, in those firms that have high-profile and widely-respected heads of IT – notably Linklaters and Berwin Leighton Paisner – fee earner satisfaction with both the performance of their systems and the role of the IT team is demonstrably higher than at other firms.

The importance of the IT director's role is underlined by the significant variation in the experiences of technology between lawyers at different law firms, even where those firms are using the same systems and applications. As ever, what you have is less important than what you do with it. How an application or system is implemented and sold to its users is often more important than what it can actually do.

What the survey demonstrates is that, to be successful, the role of the IT director should go far beyond buying, installing and maintaining equipment, systems and applications. The job description has expanded to include aligning the firm's future technology with its strategy, integrating its IT systems with those of clients and, above all, selling the benefits that technology can bring to a sometimes sceptical audience.

The survey would suggest that many are still failing to achieve this. Almost 40% of partners and more than 60% of other lawyers admit they do not even know what their firms' IT strategy is and a significant minority of respondents complain that their IT teams do not work closely enough with the fee earners. More than a third said they did not consider their IT department to be innovative and proactive.

In these respects, the performance of law firm IT teams compares poorly with their counterparts at the accounting firms. While satisfaction with day-to-day systems, services and support is broadly similar between lawyers and accountants, when it comes to the more fundamental, but less tangible, aspects of the IT department's role, a clear gap emerges. Noticeably more accountants are conversant with their firms' IT strategy than lawyers are with theirs – 47% versus 38% – and accountants are much more likely to consider their IT department to be innovative and proactive and to say that it works closely with them than their counterparts in law firms.

For those firms that recognise this picture, now is the time to act as IT is becoming a fundamental part of the business model and an indispensable tool for winning and retaining business. A law firm's technology is also playing an important role in recruiting and retaining the best staff, through the provision of home and flexible working, and tech-savvy younger lawyers are already adding technology to their list of criteria by which they evaluate which firms to join, leave or stay at. Moreover, IT also has a growing role to play in delivering productivity gains while addressing employee concerns about work-life balance as the scope to squeeze more profits out of fee earners in the traditional law firm model disappears.

Clients are also becoming increasingly interested in the technology employed by the law firms they use and the Legal Week Intelligence Customer Satisfaction Survey has charted the growing importance of law firm IT to their decisions about which firms to instruct or add to their panels. The most recent In-house Tech Survey conducted by Corporate Counsel magazine in the US, a sister publication of Legal Week, found that clients increasingly ask about e-billing, extranets and direct access to knowledge management as part of panel reviews and one-fifth explicitly link the selection of law firms to their IT offering.

As Allen & Overy's managing partner David Morley told last year's Legal Week Strategic Technology Forum, IT is no longer a back office function. "Pretty much everything we are doing now has a technology angle, but it is not always obvious," he said. This changing role is picked up in the survey – at all stages of the lawyering process – from winning and looking after clients to delivering the final bill – more lawyers look to the IT department for help than any other support department.

These trends can only intensify as time goes on. Commercial law firms may consider themselves immune from the 'commoditisation' predicted to follow the liberalisation of the legal profession that is soon to be introduced by the Legal Services Act, yet standardisation is already moving into core areas such as finance and transactional due diligence.

Clients have been campaigning for an alternative to the billable hour for some time now and the clamour is getting louder. Most recently, the survey – 'Stop the Clock' – of leading in-house lawyers published late last year by the Commerce & Industry Group and BDO Stoy Hayward found widespread support for replacing the traditional billing model with fees based on the perceived value of a piece of legal work N and two-thirds of general counsel would actually pay more for high value work if they were charged less by law firms.

Those firms that can use their IT to efficiently deliver 'low value' work at a lower cost will be in line for a greater share of the premium work in future. More generally, in a value-driven billing model, the value in law firms will be as much in the knowledge they can generate, store and repackage as it will in the day-to-day skills of their lawyers, a process in which technology will be key.

In this scenario, IT directors will play a key role. But how many are ready to step up to the plate?