I looked at blockchain in my last post, I’m looking at another conference favourite in this one (it’ll be AI next I hear you say!)
— alexgsmith (@alexgsmith) February 13, 2019
The tweet above made me smile this week. And then I saw an article by Rory Sutherland in The Spectator that pretty much summed up my feeling about Legal IT at the moment. The article was entitled “We don’t need more technology, we need better technology” which is a nice summary and I could leave it there. But it was this next line that got me and links back to the title of this post:
Innovation is a two-stage process. First you discover something; then over time people discover how best to use it.
That was it for me. Think about it the technology and data in law firms is pretty much there. Yes we might need to swap it for better and new versions in some cases, but fundamentally we need to work out how better to use it. Not just the individual systems but the technology as a whole, how to get consistency so that the data in one system means the same as in another. Then we can leverage real meaning out of it. Structure the documents with actual data (no more DOC as the type, identify the final documents etc) and then be able to match that consistently with the time recorded and matter types. Keeping a consistent data model (as a slight aside I liked this initiative I saw the other day to try and get an industry standard for matter categories). All of a sudden you can get huge benefit from your firms systems. Let’s look at what we’ve got and use it better to improve how we do things rather than buy yet another product because we’re convinced that’s the one that will make all the difference!
Finally if you have read the whole article, doesn’t this ring true with every Lync implementation (I use Lync as I think this is more pertinent to where we all were, rather than now).
Then it occurred to me: the reason home video-conferencing is such a game changer is only partly about the video. Much of the magic is in the quality of the sound.
Didn’t we all trumpet the desktop video conferencing and then realise that ensuring the voice and call quality was the killer!!
I’m pretty sure law firms start an innovation program because a rival firm was doing it first. The irony.