IT Strategy and Law Firms

I have read a few articles lately discounting the role of IT in law firms and whether IT's role can even be strategic. Some of these articles have come from vendors obviously wanted to push themselves as the "real" IT experts and others (more disturbingly) from IT managers and CIOs within law firms.
To my way of thinking any law firm with a hope of being succesful must have an overall vision and strategy for attaining that vision. It is then up to the workgroups and departments that comprise a firm to align their strategy with that vision. In our firm each department (marketing, HR, finance and IT) are involved with annual business planning and strategy sessions. This ensures that our corporate service team are able to support the work group within their own strategic plans. In IT I see our role as dual, one to provide the support the workgroups need to achieve their plans and second to look at how IT can provide our firm with a competitive advantage. Some argue that IT cannot be used to gain that competitive advantage because every law firm really operates from the same level playing field -Document Management, Practice Management etc. are fairly standard. However, there are always new and exciting technologies to take advantage of and use to promote any firm. IT is more than just keeping the lights on - although you cannot deny the importance of tactical IT operations. IT is generally a group of people with excellent process skills that are utilised accross the whole firm in a way other team members are not. That's a potent combination that can definitely be used strategically.

Training

Training is a funny beast - everyone agrees in job interviews and performance reviews that it is important. Companies with great training programs are promoted as great employers, but when the rubber hits the road and it's time to do the training, the attitude can change very quickly. Particularly in law firms where the billable hour is king, it can be very difficult to convince team members that training is necessary.

A few things we have tried are:

• Make sure that the benefit of the training and the scope of training are clearly understood. If you can give team members a sense of their ROI they will understand the importance of the training.
• Offer training in a variety of formats at a variety of times. People learn in different ways, so it's important to cater for all styles of learning - not just auditory.
• Make training as interactive as possible through the use of workshops
• Try to get other lawyers in the team to promote the training, rather than just the management groups.

With regards to training on technology, we try to build applications that are easy to use and intuitive as possible - if an application needs loads of training to be useful then I think there is something wrong with the design of the application.

Another exciting development in training is the concept of "nano-training" - breaking up training into small bite sized chunks that can be easily fitted into a quiet time at work, using online tools to do so.

Anything that diverts time away from the billable hour is a difficult sell, but by being flexible about training you get the best results.

Getting girls into IT

We live in a time of talent shortage and every industry is competing to attract the best and brightest. It's been a matter of fact that for a long time technology has ceased to attract the attention of young women. As a female in IT I can vouch for it being an exciting and satsifying career path. Yet the number of women enrolling in IT at uni is dwindling (and when I was there a few years back it was me and five other girls, so there must be one lone lady sitting in lecture theatres wondering where the sisterhood has gone). Articles on how to get girls into IT focus on encouraging young women into science and math. And while that's admirable, I don't see how that exclusively leads to a career in IT. I think it enforces a fairly dangerous stereotype. It ignores the creative and artistic side of technology. Technology is pervasive and you only have to see how girls interact communicate with one another to realise that they do love technology - they just don't associate their texting, FaceBook and MySpace-ing with a career in IT. My question for the young ladies at school now is - what tech product are you going to create that will completely alter my world - that's the kind of question that gets people excited.

Social Networking & Law Firms

What is the value of online social networking to law firms? What are the risks in allowing access, or disallowing access amongst team members?

These are a few of the questions we've been discussing lately at CGW.

It's rare these days to open a newspaper or magazine without some reference to Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, MySpace & a host of other online networking tools. Whether the article bemoans wasted productivity on Facebook or welcomes the tools a facility like LinkedIn provides, it's at the forefront of our social conciousness.

There are two sides to the social networking issue, the first is on the people side - if our team members want to communicate with their friends and colleagues online using tools like MySpace and this is important to them, shouldn't we allow this? We think so, but we realise it is also important to ensure that the business is protected. So we allow access to sites during lunch times and before and after work. We have a CGW group on Facebook and we encourage current team members and Alumni to join up. It allows us to learn a little bit more about the people we work with.

On the other side is how we can use social networking to actually promote our firm. Marketing is hard work and online tools like LinkedIn make it that little bit easier to manage our contacts.

Social networks are just another tool we use as people to communicate with one another. In a business that's all about relationships, that can only be a good thing.