Can IT help drive the legal sector through the hard times and out the other side? Tanuja Randery reports

The current recession has become infamous for its speed and bruising impact and the legal sector is feeling the pain. Even major City law firms, renowned for stability, are reporting significant loss of business and many have already made cuts or begun redundancy consultations.

This follows a period of real change in the sector in the past decade with the rise of more regional and global firms. As they go international, law firms need to change the way they operate, moving from individual outfits to cohesive international brands.

Against this backdrop, the pressure is on for firms to enhance client service, improve efficiency and reduce costs in the next couple of years. IT and communications have an important role to play in all these areas. They already pervade every part of legal practice from customer-facing portals to back office document management. In particular, improvements to communications networks can yield real, measurable results – essential for a profession for which time is literally money. So what are the main priorities for law firms as they strive to get the most out of their communications this year?

First and foremost, firms need to generate maximum value from their most valuable commodity – their fee earners – by maximising the hours they can book and bill. Since client communication is increasingly done via email and remotely on personal data assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones, fee earners need easy remote access to document management and time-reporting systems so they can do billable work and capture it accurately wherever they are. Integrating mobile devices with IT systems is one of the major challenges for many law firms.

The drive to maximise revenue is coupled with the need to ensure the utmost security in the way data is stored and transmitted. We are seeing an unabated need for highly-secure storage and archiving, especially as the volume of email continues to grow.

Firms can make major improvements in IT efficiency by centralising software applications to a single location and then offering employees web-based access from their C terminals. This not only reduces costs but also makes it easy to standardise and upgrade software. In the same vein, firms can get more out of their existing ICT investments – for example, by adding voice over IP to their data network and using more video conferencing for multi-site meetings. The use of video conferencing is also key in driving down travel expenses.

A final consideration is flexibility – it is likely that law firms will look to diversify geographically and into new areas such as environmental and sports law as the recession continues to bite. Diversification means IT departments will have to organise their communications network and IT to connect new locations and bring on more users and more data storage at very short notice – a real challenge.

All of these trends point to the need for a very secure and reliable communications infrastructure that sits at the heart of the firm's IT and gives employees easy and secure access to all the applications they need, as well as making it easy for the firms to expand. Interestingly, we have seen law firms pioneer the use of modern ethernet technology for their communications infrastructure specifically because it is a secure and flexible technology. COLT developed its 'ethernet private network' service specifically for Bird & Bird and the model is now being widely adopted in the legal and business community. With the pressure on to reduce costs and improve efficiency, we expect ethernet to be one of the key technology choices for law firms in the next couple of years.

One thing is clear: whatever technology choices law firms do make in 2009, efficiency and client service are going to be the top drivers behind any major investment.

Tanuja Randery is head of major enterprise at COLT.

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