Charles Christian: exciting initiatives are taking place in smaller practices

Although the scenario of IT enthusiast lawyers banging their heads against a wall as they despair of ever getting their Luddite colleagues to use their computers for anything other than a handy place to stick ‘post-it’ notes is being played out everyday in almost every traditional high street practice in the country, there are a growing number of firms where the benefits of IT are being enthusiastically embraced.

> Perhaps surprisingly, these are not the big City firms. They may spend millions of pounds on technology each year but they still tend to use IT for fairly pedestrian purposes: in effect on systems that merely count the beans rather than help earn more beans. Instead, most of the exciting legal IT initiatives are now taking place in smaller practices, such as in niche firms; in firms that are building up high-volume practices – such as conveyancing, personal injury claims and debt recovery work – that often operate more along the lines of an insurance call centre rather than a traditional law firm; and in start-ups formed by partners breaking away from larger, lumbering practices that are unable or unwilling to change the way they work.


The attitude of this new generation of firms is neatly summed up by Caroline Makin, the co-founder of Bradford start-up Smith & Makin: ‘When planning the business, we knew that technology had to be a core discipline from the outset. It isn’t just a case of progressing matters efficiently or processing documents quickly, it is more about having the ability to monitor workloads, measure outputs, manage resources, evaluate profitability and use the information we can extract from the system to allow us to plan ahead more effectively. For a fledgling business, this degree of insight and the control it gives you can often be the make or break when it comes to succeeding over the long term.’


> What is also interesting about many of these start-ups is they recognise the importance of not skimping on IT by trying to cut corners or buying the most basic systems, only to find they outgrow them in two years and then have to go through the upheaval of replacing them. For example, Smith & Makin invested in an Axxia system, which many might regard as big-firm technology but, as Ms Makin said at the time of ordering the system: ‘We are acutely aware that our business will evolve and that we will need our IT to evolve with it. We now have access to a whole raft of functionality that will link in seamlessly when we want it to.’


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