lt is the start of a new year, so let's start by suggesting two resolutions that a lot of law firms could usefully put on their IT agendas for the forthcoming 12 months.

Firstly, if you have not already done so, give serious thought to reorganising your accounts and practice management systems so they start to provide some useful information about the business side of running your firm. It is one thing to have your accounts records in good order, but to run a successful practice today, you also need to know who are your most profitable clients, where they came from, which departments and fee-earners are the most profitable, what can be done to bring the rest of the firm up to the same performance levels, and, if you are handling fixed-fee work, how long it really takes to process these matters - as distinct from how long you think or budgeted for it taking.

The list of questions you can ask is endless and most modern practice management systems already hold the answers. What you will need to do is improve your management information reporting facilities but, once again, most legal IT suppliers can now offer a range of solutions to address this need.

 
 
 
Charles Christian: prepare for the indroduction of .Net

Secondly, you need to find out from the companies who provide your software, just what their plans are regarding Microsoft's new .NET strategy for computing (.NET should not to be confused with NT, which is an older technology now being replaced). It is quite clear that over the next couple of years more and more of the core under-the-bonnet technologies that all law firms use (including operating systems, network servers, e-mail systems, databases and word processing) will be designed to take advantage of .NET.

The practical concern is if your suppliers have not embraced .NET - and ideally they should already be many months into their .NET product development programmes - there is a real risk you will find yourself caught up a technological cul-de-sac.

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