Staking out our turf 

Does the legal world really need another legal technology magazine? The answer is a resounding ‘yes’: certain aspects have been largely ignored during the 25 years that the general legal press has been reporting on developments in legal IT.

In the early days, the emphasis was very much on the ‘how’ aspects of technology, everything from how the latest hardware devices operate – including the memorably titled ‘My disk is floppy but I am happy’ (one I wrote for the Gazette back in 1981) – through to how to write macros for WordPerfect and accounts systems based on Excel. More recently, the emphasis has shifted to the ‘which’ side of technology: which are the latest products that vendors are launching and – more importantly – which types of system are law firms buying? But two things have been consistently overlooked: the answers to the questions ‘why?’ and ‘what?’.

Why are some firms spending truly breathtaking amounts of money on technology, while others limp by on the bare minimum? What is the strategic thinking behind these different approaches? What are they are hoping to achieve? What are the lessons to be learned from their experiences?

This is a mature market – even specialist systems like case management have been around since 1978 – and the technology works (usually). Yet there are still firms out there floundering around because their business processes are inefficient and their stakeholders lack the management information to know whether it is actually worth their while getting out of bed in the morning to go to work.

Yes, of course this publication will appeal to IT professionals, but it should also be essential reading for managing partners, management committee members, chief executives, CIOs, business development directors, finance directors and practice managers who lie awake at night worrying about the future of their firms. These days, the key differentiator between more successful practices and those that are less so is rapidly shifting from how much they spend on IT and which systems they buy, to why they buy it and what they then do with it.

It is a management thing and this is our turf: to investigate, to explore, to discuss, to explain, to consider, to review and to report on why law firms pursue the business strategies they do (and, for those that do not, why they should), and what benefits they hope to gain from all their investments in technology. Read on and enjoy – if it makes you think, then we are doing our job.