Charles Christian: partners must lead by example Book sales statistics show that after blockbusters, chick-lit and aga-sagas, the next most popular category of books people take on holiday with them in summer are inspirational business and personal development self-help guides. These are the books that have titles along the lines of 'The Attila the Hun 19 Point Detox Guide on how to clear your in-tray by 9:30, win more customers, lose weight and achieve inner happiness'. Other than the fact that they can lead to a flurry of activity in September when partners, directors and senior managers return from holiday and make their colleagues' lives a misery for a couple of weeks by trying to implement some of their recommendations - before getting bogged down with the routine of office life and forgetting all about them - they are harmless enough.

Sadly, there are no comparable books in the world of legal technology - which is hardly surprising since the phrase 'dynamic legal publisher' is an oxymoron - but if there were, two potential titles would be: 'You Cannot Push String' and 'Fish Rot from the Head' - the latter is apparently an old Croat saying.


The essence of both these books is that while the inevitable reaction of most law firm partnerships to a failed computerisation project is to look for someone else to blame - the usual suspects are the IT suppliers, their own IT or practice managers and the law firm staff who had to work with the system - the buck really does stop with the partners.


If a firm's partners exhibit a less than pro technology culture, then nobody is going to take the implementation of technology seriously. For example, you cannot expect fee-earners to change their working practices to accommodate a new IT system if it is the sort of firm where the managing partner lectures the associates on the importance of responding promptly to client e-mail messages, yet still has his own e-mails printed off and then dictates his replies for his secretary to key into the system. Law firm management must lead by example and if you analyse the success and failures of IT projects, almost without exception the failures occur in those firms where the partners do not demonstrate their commitment to technology by pulling from the top, but instead delegate the job to a more junior or less influential person who then has to try to push the project through from the bottom.


Have a good summer - and if you must work on the beach, don't get sand in your laptops.



Charles Christian is an independent adviser to the Law Society's Software Solutions Guide