The Blog
Legal IT v3.0
Posted: 07 May 2014
Legal IT v3.0
The world of legal publishing - be it software or content - has finally tipped over into the long awaited v3.0.
Thomson (C-Track) have beaten a host of other enterprise and legal software specialists to deliver the English Royal Courts case management system.
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was Law. That was v1.0.
But frankly, it?s been some time since trudging around with a volume of Halsbury has given you the leading edge in legal information services.
Brands like Sweets, Jordans and Butterworths have 150-200 year pedigrees ? the Word was strong. Now? Not so much.
Then there was The Code. Not some Star Trek Fibonacci sequence, or even a puzzle in the Temple church, but some really quite mundane C++ code automating case and matter management processes.
Most are aware of the choices ranging from Elite to Peppermint in the UK, but there?s also a lot of learning behind the court systems such as CREST and XHIBIT.
All the fastest growing parts of the legal information services industry are around the legal IT world in some shape or form now.
The legal IT world is not yet transforming behaviour beyond recognition; but no-one believes the "furniture publishing" of old holds any lessons for the future either.
It?s time now for what the technophiles would call Version 3.0.
It is more than Clouds, much more than BYOD, more than in-memory advances, more even than eDiscovery or Big data analytics (important though they are in their place).
It is, in short, time that the legal system became truly systematic - that tech finally put the WYSI- into -Wyg.
Drivers?
The drivers are clear: saving time and (usually thereby) cost. Not among firms, however, but in major administration of justice processes.
In our previous articles on Digitisis we were quite hard on the legal information services industry. It has taken decades to get ready.
Many frankly do not even see this "puck" yet. Maybe simply putting all that data on a screen was an end in itself. But it shouldn?t have been.
The elements the enthusiasts have been waiting for are finally coming together. Not as a Big Bang, but piece by piece.
The impacts on the content, computing and consulting/outsourcing teams will be profound.
In a sense law firms have no real interest in simplifying the litigation and judicial processes.
It is no surprise therefore that innovations typically come from pressure either in insurance led processes (where time is always cost) or in consumer facing ones, like debt and housing, where again the incentive to simplify and shorten the process is clear.
That debt and family courts have been among the first to actively refine processes is no accident.
Effectively all of the brand building and reinforcement efforts of the past two decades have simply been preparation for this challenge.
It is a challenge as there are really no guarantees that even the monster publishing brands like Halsbury or The White Book will win out as they should.
At their simplest these brands carry a degree of trust among the professionals they serve.
The owners of them have to prove that they can hold the clients? collective hands through the transitions ahead and if they get it right, they will be established for another decade, possibly another two centuries.
While the global brands may see Oracle or SAP as rivals, here is where the fight gets real as a software business process team (albeit a big one) are as likely to have the wherewithal to deliver this as the legal IT brands or publishers.
It is not even clear that the MoJ would automatically think of Elite or Lexis as a first port of call were they to automate the Supreme court processes ? but they should - and thankfully - they have.
Legal information services teams are finally in position to deliver some real process improvements.
The headaches within legal publishers and legal technology teams have been running in parallel with some major changes inside the Courts systems.
And the really refreshing thing is that no-one ? no really, no-one at all ? not even the visionary, rain-making, futurists are putting their name to a Big Bang theory here.
And that?s kind of a relief really.
Red Flags
You really can?t blame the futurists for keeping their head down on this one.
No doubt candidates for the Tsar role have been considered, but nobody in their right mind would step up even if the governmental decision makers who could tackle it could be fitted into one room.
The government record on major IT projects is dismal. The delivery of enterprise software solutions for government projects, let alone departments has a woeful track record.
It?s a career graveyard for civil servants and major project IT teams alike.
All the red flags for a major cock-up are also very visible.
The departments involved in the administration of justice have been chopped and changed from 2003 and 2007 most recently, but horse trading is the order of the day in the administration of justice when it covers everything from family courts and mental health to crime.
The Secretary of State for Justice and the Lord Chancellor are combined positions.
They share pieces of constitutional policy with the Deputy Prime Minister?s Office.
There are still big grey areas with the Home Office.
A different Minister deals with criminal justice to the courts and tribunal service; legal aid responsibility is split and civil liberties responsibility is shared.
That?s before you even get to the fact that legal systems are different throughout the devolved regions, nobody?s quite sure what Lords Lieutenant are still meant to be for, and the Plantagenet legacies of Crown dependencies such as Jersey are also rattling around.
The opportunities to blow a chance of the GCMG gong are legion; the Home Office seems to have passed on the "black spot" that it is famous for in political circles quite effectively.
None of the brightest and bravest from front line politics or administration are rushing to help here.
But the drivers are still there. If anything the recession and a refocusing of the administration generally on to making money not spending it has accelerated some of the ground clearing changes needed.
It probably took the biggest recession since the Wall St crash of the 1920s to ensure that the sale of large tranches of property nationally used for judges and the judicial process actually happened, for example.
Whisper it quietly, but the fact that things are so complex is accidentally doing us all a favour.
Progress is being made piecemeal by the people who really need to get it done, on small budgets with very specific targets in mind.
It can be effective, and its time has come.
One Step At A Time
So the fact that the legal information services industry has been confused, complicated and self-absorbed for decades is not a problem.
Thankfully it?s not some behemoth Whitehall project. SNAFU will remain the order of the day. But progress there is.
From highly commoditised and automated mass claims in PI to full blown court process overhauls, glimpses of the new world are evident.
There are at least two tracks running, however: case management and financial reporting.
The approach is pragmatic and piecemeal as the 2015 Business Plan sets out.
The priority has been raising revenues (tribunal fees) and piloting the process savings (Crown Court); done.
Were there to be a court wide or even jurisdiction wide approach there would almost certainly be the "courts are different and we?re more different than most" wrangle, but the recession has forced the issue.
The restructuring of small claims debt cases was a great opportunity to automate.
Similarly the review of the Family courts will deliver a simplified suite of processes which are eminently automatable.
We have probably also finally reached the point where we can accept that these processes will have to be self-cleaning or updateable on a more than once every few decades basis.
Kicking and polishing
Many, many years ago a canny old litigator who helped me transfer the first Chancery case to the newly established jurisdiction in Bristol explained over his Rumpolesque glass of claret and bulging waist-coat, that there are two types of litigator.
First, there are those who spend all their time polishing the machine that is the justice system. It has taken years to build, it has many nuances, checks and balances, and it is maintenance heavy ? deliberately so.
These guys are crucial or the system will fall over. It is brittle and cumbersome, arcane and untouchable.
And then there are the guys who just keep kicking the damned thing to make it work, as they try to get the shiny, vintage, often effete, steam powered monstrosity to produce any kind of result at all.
It is the latter who get the whip hand in the next stage of the process ? the development of V3.0.
The polishers have had their chance - decades, even centuries of it - and justice is not being served any more than cost effectiveness is.
That Thomson have led the way here is absolutely fantastic - not for them, but for everybody (yep; Lexis and BNA included).
A small £5m case management project is not winning the battle - the Ministry simultaneously outsourced £36m in application development, £19m in wide area networks and even £1m in digital forensics.
But finally Publishers and legal IT teams can step up here and push the Oracle, SAP, Capita and Siemens tanks off their lawn.
The judiciary trust their brands. The shared understanding, professionalism, and experience can and should save vast amounts of time and money.
Should the industry drop this ball or the MoJ still go it alone, there is a very real risk that the publishers are cut out, or in effect relegated to a rarely used F1 back-up button.
And we didn?t go though the pain of all that digitisation just to drop the baton on this corner, surely.
No one Legal IT team is likely to get the exclusive inside track on the process design, but being part of the upgrade, revision and improvement process will be limited to a few, very few specialists.
Both publishers and technologists would suffer if, God forbid, some other value-added reseller is given another chance to prove that adding value is usually a misnomer in legal processes.
Or we could just sit back and wait for another consultant led "lean" system, six sigma, balanced scorecard and business rules PowerPoint addict to swamp the whole issue at enormous cost.
None of these are enough on their own. It is time for strategic leadership in the industry to bring all of the skills to the table.
This is really not the time for nonsense about virtual assistants, holograms and really, really expert systems.
So who will stand up for this thankless task? (Sit down Richard ? this is not the end of anything, but the beginning of something really useful.)
No Futurists please ? it really should be line directors from information technology, LPO and publishing ? someone able to see the big picture and practically help in delivering the small steps that run from GC bills to Supreme court decisions.
The first £5m has gone to Taylor-Martin and Thomson Reuter?s C-Track team. It is but 1% of the potential of the market impact.
Finally - game on.
[This article was originally published in the NED journal Q2 2014 in a series from 2013 on Digitisation. The NED journal is only available to NED subscribers on subscription.]
The world of legal publishing - be it software or content - has finally tipped over into the long awaited v3.0.
Thomson (C-Track) have beaten a host of other enterprise and legal software specialists to deliver the English Royal Courts case management system.
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was Law. That was v1.0.
But frankly, it?s been some time since trudging around with a volume of Halsbury has given you the leading edge in legal information services.
Brands like Sweets, Jordans and Butterworths have 150-200 year pedigrees ? the Word was strong. Now? Not so much.
Then there was The Code. Not some Star Trek Fibonacci sequence, or even a puzzle in the Temple church, but some really quite mundane C++ code automating case and matter management processes.
Most are aware of the choices ranging from Elite to Peppermint in the UK, but there?s also a lot of learning behind the court systems such as CREST and XHIBIT.
All the fastest growing parts of the legal information services industry are around the legal IT world in some shape or form now.
The legal IT world is not yet transforming behaviour beyond recognition; but no-one believes the "furniture publishing" of old holds any lessons for the future either.
It?s time now for what the technophiles would call Version 3.0.
It is more than Clouds, much more than BYOD, more than in-memory advances, more even than eDiscovery or Big data analytics (important though they are in their place).
It is, in short, time that the legal system became truly systematic - that tech finally put the WYSI- into -Wyg.
Drivers?
The drivers are clear: saving time and (usually thereby) cost. Not among firms, however, but in major administration of justice processes.
In our previous articles on Digitisis we were quite hard on the legal information services industry. It has taken decades to get ready.
Many frankly do not even see this "puck" yet. Maybe simply putting all that data on a screen was an end in itself. But it shouldn?t have been.
The elements the enthusiasts have been waiting for are finally coming together. Not as a Big Bang, but piece by piece.
The impacts on the content, computing and consulting/outsourcing teams will be profound.
In a sense law firms have no real interest in simplifying the litigation and judicial processes.
It is no surprise therefore that innovations typically come from pressure either in insurance led processes (where time is always cost) or in consumer facing ones, like debt and housing, where again the incentive to simplify and shorten the process is clear.
That debt and family courts have been among the first to actively refine processes is no accident.
Effectively all of the brand building and reinforcement efforts of the past two decades have simply been preparation for this challenge.
It is a challenge as there are really no guarantees that even the monster publishing brands like Halsbury or The White Book will win out as they should.
At their simplest these brands carry a degree of trust among the professionals they serve.
The owners of them have to prove that they can hold the clients? collective hands through the transitions ahead and if they get it right, they will be established for another decade, possibly another two centuries.
While the global brands may see Oracle or SAP as rivals, here is where the fight gets real as a software business process team (albeit a big one) are as likely to have the wherewithal to deliver this as the legal IT brands or publishers.
It is not even clear that the MoJ would automatically think of Elite or Lexis as a first port of call were they to automate the Supreme court processes ? but they should - and thankfully - they have.
Legal information services teams are finally in position to deliver some real process improvements.
The headaches within legal publishers and legal technology teams have been running in parallel with some major changes inside the Courts systems.
And the really refreshing thing is that no-one ? no really, no-one at all ? not even the visionary, rain-making, futurists are putting their name to a Big Bang theory here.
And that?s kind of a relief really.
Red Flags
You really can?t blame the futurists for keeping their head down on this one.
No doubt candidates for the Tsar role have been considered, but nobody in their right mind would step up even if the governmental decision makers who could tackle it could be fitted into one room.
The government record on major IT projects is dismal. The delivery of enterprise software solutions for government projects, let alone departments has a woeful track record.
It?s a career graveyard for civil servants and major project IT teams alike.
All the red flags for a major cock-up are also very visible.
The departments involved in the administration of justice have been chopped and changed from 2003 and 2007 most recently, but horse trading is the order of the day in the administration of justice when it covers everything from family courts and mental health to crime.
The Secretary of State for Justice and the Lord Chancellor are combined positions.
They share pieces of constitutional policy with the Deputy Prime Minister?s Office.
There are still big grey areas with the Home Office.
A different Minister deals with criminal justice to the courts and tribunal service; legal aid responsibility is split and civil liberties responsibility is shared.
That?s before you even get to the fact that legal systems are different throughout the devolved regions, nobody?s quite sure what Lords Lieutenant are still meant to be for, and the Plantagenet legacies of Crown dependencies such as Jersey are also rattling around.
The opportunities to blow a chance of the GCMG gong are legion; the Home Office seems to have passed on the "black spot" that it is famous for in political circles quite effectively.
None of the brightest and bravest from front line politics or administration are rushing to help here.
But the drivers are still there. If anything the recession and a refocusing of the administration generally on to making money not spending it has accelerated some of the ground clearing changes needed.
It probably took the biggest recession since the Wall St crash of the 1920s to ensure that the sale of large tranches of property nationally used for judges and the judicial process actually happened, for example.
Whisper it quietly, but the fact that things are so complex is accidentally doing us all a favour.
Progress is being made piecemeal by the people who really need to get it done, on small budgets with very specific targets in mind.
It can be effective, and its time has come.
One Step At A Time
So the fact that the legal information services industry has been confused, complicated and self-absorbed for decades is not a problem.
Thankfully it?s not some behemoth Whitehall project. SNAFU will remain the order of the day. But progress there is.
From highly commoditised and automated mass claims in PI to full blown court process overhauls, glimpses of the new world are evident.
There are at least two tracks running, however: case management and financial reporting.
The approach is pragmatic and piecemeal as the 2015 Business Plan sets out.
The priority has been raising revenues (tribunal fees) and piloting the process savings (Crown Court); done.
Were there to be a court wide or even jurisdiction wide approach there would almost certainly be the "courts are different and we?re more different than most" wrangle, but the recession has forced the issue.
The restructuring of small claims debt cases was a great opportunity to automate.
Similarly the review of the Family courts will deliver a simplified suite of processes which are eminently automatable.
We have probably also finally reached the point where we can accept that these processes will have to be self-cleaning or updateable on a more than once every few decades basis.
Kicking and polishing
Many, many years ago a canny old litigator who helped me transfer the first Chancery case to the newly established jurisdiction in Bristol explained over his Rumpolesque glass of claret and bulging waist-coat, that there are two types of litigator.
First, there are those who spend all their time polishing the machine that is the justice system. It has taken years to build, it has many nuances, checks and balances, and it is maintenance heavy ? deliberately so.
These guys are crucial or the system will fall over. It is brittle and cumbersome, arcane and untouchable.
And then there are the guys who just keep kicking the damned thing to make it work, as they try to get the shiny, vintage, often effete, steam powered monstrosity to produce any kind of result at all.
It is the latter who get the whip hand in the next stage of the process ? the development of V3.0.
The polishers have had their chance - decades, even centuries of it - and justice is not being served any more than cost effectiveness is.
That Thomson have led the way here is absolutely fantastic - not for them, but for everybody (yep; Lexis and BNA included).
A small £5m case management project is not winning the battle - the Ministry simultaneously outsourced £36m in application development, £19m in wide area networks and even £1m in digital forensics.
But finally Publishers and legal IT teams can step up here and push the Oracle, SAP, Capita and Siemens tanks off their lawn.
The judiciary trust their brands. The shared understanding, professionalism, and experience can and should save vast amounts of time and money.
Should the industry drop this ball or the MoJ still go it alone, there is a very real risk that the publishers are cut out, or in effect relegated to a rarely used F1 back-up button.
And we didn?t go though the pain of all that digitisation just to drop the baton on this corner, surely.
No one Legal IT team is likely to get the exclusive inside track on the process design, but being part of the upgrade, revision and improvement process will be limited to a few, very few specialists.
Both publishers and technologists would suffer if, God forbid, some other value-added reseller is given another chance to prove that adding value is usually a misnomer in legal processes.
Or we could just sit back and wait for another consultant led "lean" system, six sigma, balanced scorecard and business rules PowerPoint addict to swamp the whole issue at enormous cost.
None of these are enough on their own. It is time for strategic leadership in the industry to bring all of the skills to the table.
This is really not the time for nonsense about virtual assistants, holograms and really, really expert systems.
So who will stand up for this thankless task? (Sit down Richard ? this is not the end of anything, but the beginning of something really useful.)
No Futurists please ? it really should be line directors from information technology, LPO and publishing ? someone able to see the big picture and practically help in delivering the small steps that run from GC bills to Supreme court decisions.
The first £5m has gone to Taylor-Martin and Thomson Reuter?s C-Track team. It is but 1% of the potential of the market impact.
Finally - game on.
[This article was originally published in the NED journal Q2 2014 in a series from 2013 on Digitisation. The NED journal is only available to NED subscribers on subscription.]
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