Back from your summer break? For some readers, the return to work from the long vacation will be the start of their final year in full-time employment and the start of the slow wind-down towards their retirement. Or will it?
Conversations I have had with a number of solicitors recently suggest many have been hit by the same problem encountered on a wider basis within society – namely that their pension funds are not going to provide them with the standard of living they were hoping for in retirement.


Charles Christian: home workers must be computer literateAs a result, far from hanging up their shingle at 60 or 65, many now anticipate spending the next few years staying on in legal practice as consultants to their current firms.


However, and this is where technology enters the picture, the economics of modern law firm management means few firms can nowadays afford the luxury of keeping office space permanently available for their part-time consultants. Instead, the trend is for the ‘virtual’ consultant who works from an office at home and keeps in touch with the practice via e-mail and other forms of on-line communications.


But the inevitable prerequisite here is that any virtual consultant must be computer literate.


In fact, home workers actually need a higher degree of fluency and self-sufficiency in IT matters than their office-based colleagues. For when something goes wrong (and just about the one thing you can rely on with technology is that it will go wrong at some point), they are left to their own devices, and cannot call on a network manager or someone else from the IT department to come hot-footing it round to their desk to sort out the problem for them in person.


As I have commented before, many older solicitors still take the view (perhaps understandably given human nature) that as they have managed to practise law for 30-plus years without the aid of a computer, they see no point now in going to the trouble to master IT at their age.


But although this attitude may be tolerated all the while they are in full-time employment (firms often taking the view that its easier to turn a blind eye than force a potentially unpleasant showdown), it is one of the more ironic facts of life that if these solicitors are to have viable consultancy practices to supplement their pensions in retirement, they are going to have to bite the IT bullet and attain a degree of computer literacy.


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