3rd annual LawTech conference and awards

I have just come back from the 3rd annual LawTech conference and awards. Unfortunately, while we were short listed, CGW didn't take out the small-med firm IT team of the year award for a second year running. That honour went to Andersen Lawyers this year. However, there were no repeat winners and I'll take some comfort in that.
The conference was at Byron Bay and it was great to catch up with the other legal IT managers as well as a few of the vendors. One of the best things to come out these conferences is the networking you do with your peers. Through this I found out about a great Blackberry tool called Rove. This tool allows you to control your servers from your Blackberry - from checking services to actually restarting the machine. Check it out at: http://www.rovemobile.com/mobileadmin/overview/
The sessions were a mixed bag - some where very interesting and others missed the mark. The majority of attendees were from small - med firms whilst the content tended to be targeted at larger firms. For instance, Baker & McKenzie did a session on outsourcing, which was really inter sting but none of the attendees would be considering moving their help desk to India any time soon.
Peter Williams of Deloitte Digital spoke and as always, was very entertaining and challenging. Peter is a bit of web 2.0 Evangelist who promotes the use of tools such as Facebook and YouTube in the business context. We do allow the use of those sites during the lunch break or during business hours if there is a good reason. But we tend to find that it's the support staff who make the most use of this rather than the lawyers themselves.
Peter had a few great ideas from Deliotte such as a film festival competition submitted through YouTube and an employee referral program through Facebook.