Bad form, whichever way you look at it
Thursday 11 June 2009 by Martin Langan
Even if your firm does not undertake legal aid work, please don’t switch off. Although I want to query just what the Legal Services Commission’s intentions are with regard to electronic working, there are implications in what I have to say for the Courts Service, the Tribunals Service and other organs of the state that expect law firms to bow to their dictats regarding the completion of forms.
The LSC has, from 1 June, introduced changes that affect 28 forms. One of these is a new form CLSPOA1 for claims for payments on account, which replaces form CLSCLAIM4. The new form looks very different from the old one, but most of the information required is much the same as in the old form, the principal difference being that the new form can be used to make claims in up to 15 matters, whereas the old form was for one matter only.
You might think that it is a good thing that 15 forms can be condensed into one. But if you have invested in case management systems that can automate production of a claim form in each matter, you will realise that a matter-based case management system is incapable of populating a form with data other than those produced by a single matter.
The LSC says that the form was introduced after a successful pilot with ‘a number of providers’. Just who were these providers and how do they usually produce their forms? If they write them out by hand, then no doubt a single form dealing with up to 15 claims is very good news for them. But for firms operating in a modern way, the change is irrelevant, although sadly they have to spend time and money in reprogramming the new form to do what the old one did.
The LSC is introducing compulsory electronic interaction with suppliers from April next year. Why then are they introducing changes to forms that benefit only firms that have not yet participated in the digital age? Could it be that it suits the LSC very well to deal with multiple claims in one form, regardless of what this means for the supplier?
I have written about the LSC mission to impose electronic working in law firms here. In that article I give examples of a failure to consider the poor old solicitor when introducing new forms, whether they are produced by the LSC, the Courts Service or the Tribunals Service. When will those institutions start to take account of the considerable investment that firms have made in IT?
Comments
Reason has always existed...
Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. (Karl Marx)
It seems like the right questions were not asked or the answers were not understood. Until that happens the same error will be repeated time and again leaving the solution architects to wonder why no-one is using their shiny new forms.
A form ought to be merely a means to the capture and present all the necessary data in an orderly manner. It is the data that is important, not the form itself. And for years the most common open-standard for sharing data between different systems is extensible markup language (XML). A good case management system ought to have an option to export data as XML. The XML can then be sent to the LSC or whatever other system without the overhead of all the formatting and images that decorate the actual form. The LSC system need have no knowledge of what system was used to create the XML. Were this the case, a new form would have minimal impact on the many case management systems used by the law firms.
Here is how it works in a nutshell...
The LSC, instead of producing a form, would create an XSD schema. The schema defines the fields that should be in the XML document. It can define which fields are mandatory as well as which values are acceptable. But what if the XML from the case management system does not match the schema?
In the XML world data can be transformed via something called XSLT which stands for Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations. Suppose your system output a field called ZipCode but the schema required it to be called PostCode, the contents of ZipCode would be mapped to PostCode in the XSLT. Other examples include changing currency symbols to codes or summing a column of numbers to output the total.
Once in the correct format, the XML data may be sent to the LSC in any number of ways including via email. The LSC system would then process the data. At that time they may convert the data into human-readable form such as an email confirmation and the process would be complete.
Whilst the above might sound convoluted to the non-technical, it really isn't. Nor need it be expensive. For example the whole process could be handled in Microsoft Word if needs be. Microsoft Office has been able to process XSD and XSLT since 2003. A low cost electronic filing solution might only involve designing a few new Word templates that had the XSD and the XSLT embedded. Sending the data is simply a matter of selecting the 'Data only' option on the Word Save-as dialog. Adobe forms offer similar XML capabilities as does OpenOffice.
The devil is obviously in the detail but you get the picture. Electronic working is happening all around us. The tools probably already exist on every PC. Why not design low cost systems that reuse that existing technology for a wider acceptance among the user community?
The here and now
Trevor is quite right and I touch on the likely demise of forms as we know them in the article referred to in my blog.
Meanwhile, the LSC require their forms to be completed as forms, with the odd exception, such as the bulkload claim files which can indeed be produced by case management systems in XML format. The vast majority of forms are just forms, but they are forms that can and are programmed by law firms with data variables produced by their case applications.
The LSC, in common with other bodies with whom the profession has to engage, consistently fail to have regard to those case applications, whilst exhorting the need to work electronically.
"Have confidence that if you have done a little thing well, you can do a bigger thing well too." (Oliver Goldsmith)
The LSC can't even manage their own IT
Does any solicitor really believe that the LSC can help us with our IT when they can't even manage their own!
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