A glimpse of the future

Calling all partners. If one of your expensive gadgets breaks down, don’t - for Pete’s sake - call the head of IT.

Delegates at the Legal Week Strategic Technology Forum in Portugal last week were at pains to point out that their knowledge of how different widgets actually work can be patchy, at best. Their job is to get somebody else to pull the levers and they might just as well be on the other side of the world.

Whether this is merely a cunning ruse to persuade partners to use the helpdesk is not clear, but from the point of view of the 'lay person', the conference’s focus on strategy certainly kept the amount of indecipherable jargon down to manageable levels.

It also left plenty of time for crystal ball-gazing about the future of the legal profession. If the conference is anything to go by, outsourcing, in all its guises, remains firmly on the agenda.

The same can also be said for the automated provision of legal advice, an issue that refuses to go away, as testified by Allen & Overy's (A&O's) continued investment in online derivatives products. The leading firms also continue to grapple with the issue of how to most effectively collect and exploit their know-how.

"The main theme that I got out of the conference,” reflects its chair, Ian McFiggans, IT director at Lovells, “is the inter-dependence that exists between all the functions within a law firm."

Testament to this came from the presence at the conference of senior mangers like Osborne Clarke COO Chris Bull and SJ Berwin’s longstanding chief executive, Keith Wood, as well as people from knowledge management and business development.

As for the managing partners, they were represented by the heavyweight triumvirate of Linklaters’ Tony Angel, A&O’s David Morley and Berwin Leighton Paisner’s Neville Eisenberg. They took part in a pre-recorded panel discussion led by the legal profession’s chief ‘technologist’, Richard Susskind, and screened at the start of the conference.

“I wish my managing partner knew that much about IT,” was the typical reaction of the delegates, who were genuinely impressed with the trio’s knowledge of all things technological, including, as it happens, the power of a certain website called, er, Facebook.

So the next time a bit of your hardware goes on the blink….. you know who to ring.

john.malpas@legalweek.com