With budgets under pressure, IT heads are scrambling to adapt to consumerisation, contain costs and find ways to capture and manage commercially crucial data. Neil Hodge tracks the latest trends in legal tech

With the global economy facing another year of sluggish growth, law firms are faced with an increasingly precarious balancing act regarding technology. While capital spending in IT is often one of the first areas to suffer during tough trading conditions, clients and staff have rising expectations of technology.

Security, easier access to data, a more flexible use of mobile technology than the once-ubiquitous BlackBerry – these (sometimes conflicting) expectations are not easy to manage when IT departments are under pressure to manage costs.

Nevertheless, a good number of law firms are moving to upgrade their IT infrastructure and software – not least because many clients expect their advisers to keep pace with their own systems.

Thomas Eggar, for example, has made a substantial investment in IT in the past year. It has bought in MimeCast as a cloud-based email back-up package and is considering investing in Microsoft's SharePoint technology as part of its information management system and a business process management tool to make the firm more efficient – at a cost of £200,000 to roll-out to over 500 desktops.

On a far larger scale, DLA Piper is currently carrying out a significant overhaul of its IT infrastructure. It is rolling out Windows 7 and Office 2010 as part of an upgrade programme which includes replacing 5,000 PCs with new generation hardware by the end of next year. It is also moving towards next generation printing in an effort to cut 30% of its annual printing costs.

The firm is also introducing Microsoft Lync for instant messaging and desktop audio and video conferencing capabilities. It is using cloud-based services to allow lawyers to work remotely and to use non-firm devices.

Janet Day, IT director at Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP), says that her firm is pre-occupied with three IT initiatives: moving towards virtualisation of the desktop infrastructure so that the firm's 1,500 lawyers can work remotely and securely on both laptops and handheld devices; investing in management and business information tools; and ensuring that IT operations and processes keep pace with regulatory and compliance standards.

Day comments: "Everyone realises that you need the right tools to do the job and these are the three key areas where we feel we need to make our IT spend."

Some firms have had to overhaul their systems out of necessity. Andrew Jurczyk, chief information officer (CIO) at SNR Denton, says that a lot of the firm's IT spend is being allocated towards integrating divergent IT systems. Following the September 2010 merger between Denton Wilde Sapte and US firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, the new entity is trying to get a system up and running that can allow easy and shared access across all operations.

"We now have a global desktop after working for some time with divergent IT systems in our US and EMEA operations," says Jurczyk. "We have therefore spent a lot of time and money developing an architecture that is going to support both our lawyers' and clients' needs. We have invested in Windows 7 and we have just completed the roll-out of Microsoft Exchange 2010 in the US. We expect to complete the process throughout EMEA next April. It will allow us to share client information and collaborate more easily and securely while allowing lawyers to access it on desktops and remotely on other devices," he says.

Yet despite such large initiatives, firms have realised that even relatively small investments can have major impacts on fee earner and client satisfaction. CIOs and IT directors at some of the UK's leading law firms say that their focus has changed since the recession, and that they are more geared towards trying to meet the individual needs of fee earners than opting to roll-out potentially expensive software across the entire business that is either not used or badly deployed.

Cometh consumerisation

One of the key trends that IT departments are currently preoccupied with is trying to capitalise on lawyers' own investment in technologies, such as iPads, iPhones, Android devices and other handheld communication devices.

While the majority of lawyers are still sticking to their BlackBerry as their primary communication tool – although DLA Piper was quoted last month saying it was reviewing its options in the light of BlackBerry's much-publicised two-day breakdown in service – IT departments need to be able to support whatever platform lawyers decide to use. This requires, as several CIOs admit, considerable work.

Daniel Pollick, CIO and director of business infrastructure at DLA Piper, comments: "It has created additional support issues that we need to address and budget for. For example, we are trying to take advantage of the fact that people have bought their own devices, such as iPads and personal laptops. But we need to make sure we can support that technology so that lawyers can access the same services on these devices as they would on a BlackBerry or a firm-provided laptop, and that is not always as easy as it sounds."

Norton Rose has invested in MobileIron's mobility management software as a platform to support devices other than the corporate-issued BlackBerry. According to Vlad Botic, the firm's chief enterprise architect, the key challenge was securing the device as well as the data in transit. As the law firm often has to manage conflict issues, Botic says that it was vital to have a software package that could extend that same secure separation of data to mobile devices accessing the corporate network. "All these new devices were going to be employee-owned so it was also important to have a way to draw a line between personal and corporate data," he says.

Norton Rose began the project by running a pilot using iPads. Once complete, the firm will then move to a phased migration across five regional hubs in Dubai, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Paris and Singapore.

Eversheds, meanwhile, was one of the first to experiment with consumer-focused technology after last year rolling out over 500 iPads to its lawyers. Paul Caris, the firm's CIO, says: "It is important to make the IT department incredibly agile so that you can embrace these new technologies and adopt them in a secure way."

Caris argues that there are other ways that IT departments can exploit the technical savvy of the firm's lawyers. "If lawyers are comfortable buying the latest hi-tech gadgets and can use them comfortably, then that should give IT departments the confidence to think that they only need to support their use of these devices, and not teach them how to use them. This saves us time and money."

As a result, Eversheds has set up a self-help support platform so that staff can share advice and work out how to deal with any technical difficulties they might encounter on the iPad and any other devices. Caris also wants to encourage lawyers to trial some of Apple's apps, in particular the Siri app on the latest iPhone 4S. The app is a digital personal assistant based on voice recognition software that lets people use their voice to send messages, schedule meetings and place phone calls. It can even send an email of your verbal statements to a client or a colleague – an ideal tool when lawyers are on the move.

"Lawyers love dictation, so we are trialling how effective this app might be and how easy and reliable it is to use. In theory, it can be a fantastic tool because lawyers can simply speak into the device and set up appointments and email the information to colleagues, secretaries and clients. Our view is that small devices and cheap apps can have a large impact on our business operations, so we should use them," says Caris.

Other firms are also actively engaging in using 'no-cost' applications to promote better client communications and media coverage. Sarah Ball, operations director at Thomas Eggar, says that the firm has eight accounts on Twitter and four on LinkedIn as a way of keeping in touch with clients. "We use social media sites as a way of information sharing between colleagues and clients, often circulating news items that might be of interest. Anything that can help improve communication between clients and law firms is always useful, especially if it is free to use," she says.

Targeted investment

Unfortunately, not all business IT tools are free – or cheap. The price to roll out some software is just too prohibitive, say some CIOs, and so use is limited to those who will benefit from the investment the most.

For example, Field Fisher Waterhouse has invested in IT firm SRC's desktop speech recognition system which allows lawyers to draft legal notes themselves, quickly and accurately, with the document immediately created on screen for review before they send it to the client.

But its use is limited to a select few – for the moment. "We do not intend on rolling this out across the organisation, at least not at this stage, because the software is not cheap. Instead, we are willing to provide it to those lawyers who feel they need it and will use it. It is still very much in the early stages of use and it has only been rolled out to about 25 people," says Maurice Tunney, Field Fisher head of IT.

CIOs say they are increasingly aware that they need to focus on buying in technology that will be widely used and that is easy to understand and maintain. As a result, many firms are investing in lower-cost software that will guarantee widespread use, particularly if they can also be deployed on mobile devices. For example, Capital Law ICT developer Sarah Pomeroy says that her firm uses an intranet dashboard with news and discussion forums to share information across the company.

"The website also allows the corporate team to create deal rooms, where clients can view key documentation. This is something the lawyers look after themselves via our website's content management system," 
she adds.

Herbert Smith has rolled out Adobe Acrobat to assemble case documents, securely redact information and complete forms. In particular, the firm wanted to find a better way to prepare litigation case documents, especially as courts in England and Wales are moving towards electronic filing of case documents. "Managing documents in hard copy meant that if we had to take out exhibit three on page 30, we had to throw everything away, print it out again, and then go through with a hard copy paginator and repaginate," says Andrew Moir, a partner in the firm's intellectual property practice. "By using Adobe Acrobat, we can simply remove the relevant exhibit electronically and repaginate instantly."

There are several other software packages on the market that allow lawyers to edit documents on the move and reduce the firm's printing and paper costs. For example, Workshare Professional allows legal professionals to easily compare changes to word documents and PDFs as well as clean hidden metadata from documents. It also enables users to summarise the changes by category, alert them on receipt of a changed document and automatically run comparisons directly from Microsoft Outlook. In tests this has been shown to reduce the effort to run a comparison from 14 clicks to just two.

Baker & McKenzie uses the software as a way to streamline the process of creating and reviewing legal documents and contracts. It has estimated that the software has saved it thousands of hours, resulting in a 663% return on investment. The firm's secretarial and paralegal staff save half an hour a day through better collaboration with document reviewers, reduced review cycles and a faster document production process. The IT staff saves approximately one hour a week that was previously spent rectifying document problems.

Firms have also realised that they need to make better use of the information that they have at their fingertips and leverage it to drive the business.

Indeed, many technology professionals see the ability to better utilise information commercially as the best means by which to demonstrate the hard value of IT, helping to change attitudes towards technology, from cost drain to proactive driver of the business. The ability to easily, flexibly and securely access information across the firm – and across different devices – is viewed as a key method to demonstrate to partners the huge potential of technology to law firms. (This focus also partly explains why more heads of technology are now called chief information officers).

Reynolds Porter Chamberlain has recently invested in QlikView, a business intelligence tool, to create a support service that enables staff and partners to view, analyse and interact with data and monitor financial performance more effectively.

The information is presented instantly through a dashboard, allowing managing partners to review performance and identify broad trends. They can then drill down through the data to understand cause and effect by client, fee earner, practice area, or any other metric for which they hold information. QlikView also has an application that can detect potential conflicts of interests. Automating such processes provides the firm with greater assurance, and for a fraction of the previous cost.

Julie Berry (pictured), director of infrastructure at the law firm, says that the software has helped the firm take a step forward to understanding the profitability of its clients and their industry sectors. "Before we used QlikView, we weren't looking at trends within our own business or our clients' business and we were missing potential leads. As the legal services market becomes more competitive, we just can't afford to miss opportunities to help clients when we already have the data to hand."

Cloudy outlook

Undoubtedly, one of the fastest growing areas for IT investment at the moment is for cloud services. These allow law firms to – among other things – archive data and back-up emails, and enable lawyers to access documentation remotely and securely. They are also heavily touted for their cost savings – IT upgrades and administration are the responsibility of the 
service provider.

The process has already been widely adopted among large US law firms – though typically in relatively discreet areas of technology such as email management and storage. Cloud computing attracts such attention because in theory it represents a means to convert high capital spending into more manageable operating expenses.However, experience in the US suggests that the level of cost savings can vary enormously and security remains a perennial concern.

Take up of cloud computing – while being a hot topic – has so far been slower in the UK. However, a few major law firms have started to experiment. At the end of July Field Fisher announced that it is migrating its IT infrastructure to a cloud computing environment via Virtustream's enterprise cloud platform, xStream. By consolidating several servers and migrating from a physical environment to an on-premise cloud, over the next five years Field Fisher expects to cut power consumption by up to 70% and its carbon footprint by more than 900 tonnes, as well as reduce server costs associated with renewals, hardware and maintenance. The cloud platform will also provide improved business continuity and automated data disaster recovery capabilities.

"We identified that we had about 190 servers and that we were using outdated software," says Tunney. "We felt that this took up too much space and required too much maintenance. We have now replicated all our data onto their servers, which means that the data is secure and backed-up." Tunney adds that the firm uses a private cloud for email management and to control spam.

But while law firms may be comfortable using private cloud services – or even 'hybrid' cloud services based on a mixture of public and private servers – 
opting for fully public cloud services is unpalatable.

Tony Cordeiro, CIO at White & Case, says: "Law firms are going to be very conservative and I don't think any will put their data on a public cloud. There is just too much at stake. Their reputation is based upon client confidentiality and data protection, so the thought of just putting all their information on a public cloud just does not make sense."

And data security is an issue that Cordeiro takes very seriously: in October White & Case became one of the few law firms ever to achieve the ISO/IEC 27001 certification for information protection and security, which is the only auditable international benchmark for information security management.

Yet there are some who feel that once one law firm takes the decisive step and opts to use public cloud services, others will follow – although perhaps tentatively. "We will continue to look at what cloud services could do for us in the round," says Day at BLP. "I am not minded at this stage to think about moving to a public cloud environment – it just isn't a market that we want to be first in."

Other CIOs believe that public cloud services are not of any value to law firms. Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer CIO Paul Domnick says: "We are not comfortable with putting client data on a public cloud – there is just no protection." SNR Denton's Jurczyk concludes: "In 10 years' time, there will not be anything that is not on the cloud – though whether it is a public cloud is debatable."

Change management

If cloud computing represents an attempt to provide the same service via a cheaper means of outsourcing, perhaps the most interesting issue for law firms is what new tools will develop.

A number of IT heads are discussing the successor to the humble email – which has been established as the backbone of law firm communication since it displaced the fax in the late 1990s. While it is not yet it clear what will replace it, the expectation is that lawyer/client communications will evolve to focus on more flexible and fast ways to share documents, while some younger lawyers are already turning to web-based communication tools.

In a similar vein, law firms are expected to build more collaborative tools to communicate with clients – though cynics may point out that overblown predictions of such developments have been made for years. Field Fisher, for example, has just implemented a new system called Office Communication Server, which will allow key clients to gain detailed information regarding available lawyers and to communicate via instant messaging during current assignments. Other firms report working on similar initiatives to improve communication with clients.

Perhaps the shift for legal technology will come when it begins to achieve the kind of intuitive ease of use that has revolutionised personal technology through smart phones, tablets and social media. Arguably, such a shift could come when personal technology itself more fully integrates with corporate systems.

In the meantime, CIOs keep striving to stretch their budgets to keep pace with a fast-changing legal marketplace.

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The outsourcing option and technology

While chief information officers (CIOs) may be hunting around for the best technology to ensure the mobility of their lawyers and the security of their devices and content, outsourcing support and back-office services is still a favoured option for many firms.

Last November Allen & Overy (A&O) announced that it had cut its overall IT spend by 10% during the past financial year, saving more than £1m through measures including the extension of an agreement with IT outsourcer Savvis to its European network. In May 2010 CMS Cameron McKenna outsourced its entire support staff function after signing an agreement with Integreon to try to achieve cost savings of between 10% and 15%.

This October Eversheds has agreed a new five-year IT services contract with Computacenter, billed as giving the law firm cradle-to-grave life cycle management for desktop devices, end user support, data centre hosting and remote management. Computacenter will also provide services to 25 of Eversheds' 46 international offices across the globe. The contract will allow Eversheds to modify or terminate aspects of service delivery, thereby only paying for the services that it needs.

Law firm Morgan Cole has recently decided to work with IT service management specialists LANDesk Software because the costs of upgrading its own IT were too high. "Every three years we had to bring in external consultants to carry out a desktop refresh at a cost of £75,000," says David Elms, the firm's service delivery manager. "When an upgrade was due this year, we decided to invest in a solution that would not only facilitate all future refreshes, which saves us £75,000 over the three-year life cycle, but would also transform our day-to-day service desk operations," he adds.

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Being commercial – how far can the CIO role evolve?

Given the financial restraints that chief information officers (CIOs) have had to work under since the financial crisis took hold in 2008, there is a widespread feeling that senior technology professionals are moving to emphasise their commercial and strategic role to avoid being seen as merely a cost centre.

Paul Caris (pictured), CIO at Eversheds, argues that his role has moved from being one of technical support to "business enabler". "Everyone now realises that IT is a key business tool, and the 'C' in our title means that we sit on the executive board. To earn that right, you have to think strategically and not just focus on the technical issues."

Vlad Botik, chief enterprise architect at Norton Rose, agrees that the CIO should be on the executive board, although he adds that this is not the case at his law firm. "I believe that IT is no longer just a technical consideration and that it feeds into the business strategy of the firm. As a result, the CIO should be on the board because his role is as a business enabler."

Others believe that the role has broadened, as well as becoming more strategic. Daniel Pollick, CIO and director of business infrastructure at DLA Piper, says: "In recent years, law firm CIOs have increasingly been asked to take responsibility for other parts of the firm's business infrastructure, such as buildings and facilities, risk management and knowledge management. This is partly as a result of the recession that has placed such focus on operational costs, and partly that CIOs are seen as having the ability to run operational services effectively."

With the no sign of a robust recovery taking hold, expect IT heads to take every opportunity to demonstrate their commercial relevance to their law firm employers.

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