Using the latest technology to offer legal services as commodity products can help law firms make savings while keeping lawyers working in teams as effectively as before. The increase in profitablilty could be spectacular, reports Rupert White


A future not tied to an office - the essence of the virtual firm - looms large as technology improves and legal advice becomes a commodity product. Home and remote working figured in the plans of most of those at the recent Gazette IT roundtable.



James Knight, head of the 45-lawyer virtual firm Lawyers Direct, explained how technology helped him make his firm work, and what kind of business model he used.



'What technology allows us to do is not just for [our lawyers] to work as one-man bands, but for them to work in teams as effectively as they used to work in their previous firms. Technology helps that immensely,' he told the group.



But not everything was positive. There were warnings from all the IT people present about the dangers of simply installing systems and believing that is enough. Sam Luxford-Watts, IT manager for Winckworth Sherwood in London, was straightforward about what firms should avoid at all costs: complacency.



'You can put an application in in five minutes. But you also need to get it to work with everything else, and work seamlessly. Otherwise technology adds to people's workloads. Unless you integrate it, you don't get any value from it. And, to be honest, people won't actually use any of the features within it until it is integrated.'



This was not the only downside to technology that cropped up - Jon Gould, IT director at City law firm Charles Russell, is surely not the only IT head to have experienced the results of a work-life imbalance: 'Home-working and remote working is absolutely going to increase. But we're seeing BlackBerrys which are coming back because they've been thrown against hotel walls by spouses on holiday - they're so fed up with the fact that there is now no escape from the workplace.'



Those rabid BlackBerry users are probably in the good books of Legal Software Suppliers' Association chairman Simon Meehan. It is those who are not who cause problems for companies trying to push forward, he said. 'In our experience, you've got the cans, the can'ts and the won'ts. The cans you don't have a problem with. The can'ts, it's a training exercise. The won'ts &150; how do you manage them? But they've got to change. The partners within the firms have got to understand that the technology is going to make the difference.'



This pulling from the top in terms of technological adoption was a striking theme of the forum, as was the need for some law firms to understand that they are, or soon will be, selling legal advice as a commodity product. But this is no bad thing. Mr Gould said the managing director of a financial services organisation recently gave him a refreshing change of view.



'I'd gone in there with this conceit that we had X number of staff, our turnover is X million, our profitability is 35%,' said Mr Gould. 'He, by contrast, sat back in his seat and said, for a firm with an identical headcount to mine, his turnover is £875 million. His profitability is 78%. And I asked what his biggest problem was, and he said: "We can't get enough trucks to take the money to the bank". So I went away and tried to work out what they're doing that we're not.'



The answer, said one panel member, was that the financial firm is selling commodity. 'Precisely,' said Mr Gould. How firms deal with that will determine if they end up needing those money trucks, or a fleet of removal vans instead.



The Gazette is considering organising another panel; to participate email rupert.white@lawsociety.org.uk