Here are some of the many technologies and solutions adding value in the legal operations in which Ken is well versed and available to discuss with potential clients.
Practice and Matter Management
Various cloud-based options exist to help law firms organize their practice and matter management activities. These ranges from custom solutions, offerings hosted within major ecosystems such as Salesforce or Microsoft, and offerings within law firm technology subsidiaries.
Litigation Platforms
Build-it-your yourself no/low code litigation platforms offer huge upside potential in areas such as case preparation, court filing automation, the automation of rote processes, construction of litigation specific research and brief banks and many other use cases. Extending the functionality of core systems via application program interfaces (API) to link together related by disparate systems (e.g. matter management and document management) is another tremendous opportunity in this space.
Law Firm Technology Management
Often, law firms benefit from implementing best practices related to common technology management needs. These include change management processes, the automation of system documentation, asset and cost management, use of technologies like Git code/issue tracking and tagging to manage technology-based IP in a like manner to how legal documents are managed in a document management system, and the systematic calendaring of renewals/audit related activities.
Advanced e-Discovery
More and more, modern communication is shifting to new technologies. Slack, SMS, Teams chats, instance messaging are only a few of the many examples. Technologies geared to support collection, ingestion, processing and analysis of all this new data will be of increasing value in the profession. Also, the use of traditional E-Discovery technology applied to alternative use cases (long-term hosting for extended litigations at reduced costs) is a strong opportunity for improvement in this area.
Custom Applications Development
No industry has off-the-shelf products available to meet every available need within an acceptable time frame and budgetary model. The role of custom-built applications supporting client needs is a long-standing practice within law firms to help differentiate a firm from the competition. Ken has extensive experience orchestrating the construction of custom software to assist clients in a unique manner.
Security
This area being incredibly dynamic, there are increasingly various threat intelligence products, leading security vendors in the legal space, legal specific industry associations and changing practices relating to the legal professional Model Rules of Ethics which all collectively help protect best-in-breed law firms investing the resources necessarily to keep current in this ever-changing space.
CASE STUDIES
Comprehensive Security Program
A significant element of law firm security programs is, of course, deeply technical. End point protection, firewalls, security scans and the configuration of the many protective tools all falls within the category of specialized security and engineering work.
That being said, there is also a significant project management element of security programs. Selecting employee training (what format, how often, content prioritization) is an art, not a science. Working with clients, internal management, auditors and brokers on critical projects like securing cyber insurance require strong communications skills and project management expertise in addition to technical familiarity to work with all the non-technical stakeholders.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800-53 Control Families require a security leader with the broadest possible set of competencies and skills to compliment the equally important technical security professionals whom, together, for the best team possible to protect a law firm.
Extending The Value Of COre Law Firm TEchnology (E.g. Document Management Systems)
Law firms invest in several types of core system functionality. Time entry/accounting, document management systems, legal contract solutions, customer relationship management systems are but a few of the key tools in a law firm’s toolkit to help run in a smooth, effective manner.
Extending the value of a tool however, is a strategy requiring more insightful technical leadership. What is one example?
Consider time entry and accounting. Every law firm needs a process to allow timekeepers to enter their billable time. But offering modules to automatically collect time based on work tasks is a step forward. As is linking the time entries to a business intelligence (BI) platform to empower modern, dashboard like management analysis. And accelerating the rate for permitting data analysis from perhaps a monthly load to a daily refresh drives more timely corrective action for noteworthy trends. And finally, passing financial data back into matter management and budgeting tools further supports sophisticated profitability analysis by partner, practice, office, etc.
This concept can be extended to all other core technologies also (e.g. document management systems with improved search capability and links into practice management tools greatly improve attorney efficiency and work product). Skilled technology leadership applied to each of the core technologies helps law firms get more bang for their buck with their legal spend.
Ken Jones 