Janet Day, IT director at Berwin Leighton, has more experience than most in the legal sector. Her 20-year career began after university as an administrative assistant at Allen & Overy, where she ended up running the firm’s worldwide IT services.
“I thought it was time to grow up, so I took an MBA and started an IT consultancy, which is still running,” she says. “I have been with Berwin Leighton since 1996.
I was working on the roll-out of the company’s new systems when I was offered a permanent post – but I retained the option to consult across the whole market.” She says her strength as a consultant lies in her versatility. “Many consultants tend to focus on either strategic or pragmatic solutions,” she says. “I am happy to do both.”
Day is playing a leading role in the launch of Be-Professional, a joint e-commerce venture in partnership with Deloitte & Touche. Both companies are jointly investing £5m in the new venture, which aims to provide online legal and professional services to the small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector. “We started work on Be-Professional in the spring,” she explains. “WorldPay provides the hosting environment and the e-payment facility for the site. Clients can use Be-Professional to build privacy statements and register for VAT online, if they need to do so.” The VAT and tax advice provided covers all jurisdictions in the European Union, and although the October launch will focus mainly
on the UK, Be-Professional intends to move into Europe.
Day is also the driving force behind Be-legal.com, one of the first legal services websites. “The pre-launch was announced before Christmas last year,” she says. “We were thinking about how to change the mechanisms for offering things.
I was working on a document automation project with Quentin
Solt, a corporate partner, and we realised that what was missing was an efficient delivery mechanism for the client.”
Be-legal is a web-based fulfilment service that cuts out the direct involvement of a solicitor. “Most sites are focused solely on providing web-based advice,” she says.
“Be-legal is different because it delivers a completed document by using a series of structured questions with associated decision trees. We spend a lot of time considering what market research can tell us and the site will develop additional services as we identify new needs.”
Day has seen a rapid increase in the importance of the IT professional. “Once upon a time, IT was a small,
back office concern, but it has become much more of a frontline activity,” she says. “The people and the role have changed beyond recognition. So have firms’ expectations. The burden of responsibility has also shifted – we have
to take on a multitude of responsibilities for what could
happen, rather than just provide solutions for what has happened. It is a proactive role, where it used to be
responsive. It has become more strategic, creative,
analytical and business-oriented.”
Day identifies three key priorities for the future: “To maximise investment and our comprehension of what IT is capable of; to use technology to help the firm preserve its relationships with clients; and to maintain – and
continually evaluate – an awareness of what has been done and what technology can achieve.”
She recognises the importance of forward planning. “The speed of change is awesome,” she says. “The rules two years ago are not the rules now.” Day attributes the speed of growth to the fact that all the processes in a law firm require an underlying technology structure, which shifts the IT director’s role to the hub of the firm’s strategic agenda. “It used to be embarrassing to be
technically able,” she says. “Now it is a positive thing, the rock that underpins the delivery of legal services.
For the first time, it is seen as as valuable and critical
as any other profession.” She predicts that “whoever joins the legal profession now is in for the most exciting 10 years of their life”.
According to Day, as systems revolutionise legal practice, effectively shaping it and commoditising its services, “the number of lawyers in practice will diminish, but the firms that are left will be exciting places to work and the lawyers will be the best”. The casualties will be those practices that “have not bothered to look at the way they deliver services”. This presents more of an operational challenge for larger firms because the advantages of an economy of scale are outweighed by the complexity of keeping a large organisation up to date. “Smaller firms can more easily set about changing the way they apply specialist knowledge,” she says. “It is the dilettantes that will disappear.”
Annemarie Elmer, European IT director at Baker & McKenzie, is a recent arrival in the field, unlike many of her
colleagues at the top of the legal IT ladder. Oil and gas might not be the obvious path to such a job, but 15 years in that industry prepared Elmer for corporate legal IT.
A fascination with mathematics was the reason behind her career path. “Maths has always been my subject,” she says. “I went to Nottingham University in 1978 to read maths and engineering because I wanted to do something a little more hands-on than pure maths. As I went through the degree course, I tended to stick to software engineering. And towards the end of my degree I decided IT was the way I wanted to go.”
She worked briefly for a small engineering company before moving into the oil and gas industry. “Then, about two-and-a-half years ago I decided I wanted to do something completely different,” she says. “I have always had some interest in the legal field because my father was a lawyer.” When she was 12, her father came home from work, described to her the first word processor he had ever seen, and explained how it was going to revolutionise his work. “I look back now and wonder whether that had an effect on my career,” she says.
Undeterred by an advertisement requiring previous
experience in the legal sector, Elmer applied for her post
at Baker & McKenzie. “The relationship-management
side of IT has grown in importance, which was why
Bakers hired me,” she explains. “A lot of IT is easily
transferable from one profession to another. I was interested in legal IT because it was an area where the full capabilities of IT had not been exploited. Lawyers had PCs on their desks and they used them for word processing, document management and e-mail, but that was it. I had looked around to see how law firms were using IT and there were plenty of opportunities for the business to benefit.”
Since then, Elmer concedes that the situation has changed immeasurably. “IT has become a battlefield for corporate law firms and it will continue to be over the next few years,” she says. “Clients have developed higher expectations. Their accountants are able to give them online access to services, so they want to know why lawyers cannot.” According to Elmer, the rise of legal IT has much to do with practices following the lead of accountancy firms, which were switched on to technology by their association with consulting companies.
Although she has been with Bakers for less than three years, Elmer received a big promotion in October, when she was given the responsibility for IT across Europe. “I sit on a team of five people who manage the overall IT strategy for Baker & McKenzie on a global scale,” she says. “It consists of the global IT director and the four regional directors of North America, South America, Asia-Pacific and Europe.” Her role is divided between the European region and the London office. “I would say 25% of my time is dedicated to global and strategic issues and about 20% of the time is spent co-ordinating the 24 European offices.” This is no mean feat because during the past nine months the IT departments around the globe have been developing much stronger links to the hub. “We try to act as one IT team rather than as separate pockets of IT people,” Elmer explains. “There is a lot of effort involved.”
Although based in Bakers’ London office, Elmer finds
she has to delegate most of the day-to-day running of the IT department to her managers. “When I am in the London office I try to spend time talking to lawyers and, when
possible, to clients,” she says. “What I am trying to do with the Europe role is to go to the offices and talk to the
partners, as well as the IT people, to make sure we
understand what they want.” She is increasingly called on to explain the firm’s IT functions to clients. “There is a lot more emphasis on that these days.” For example, she was recently involved in a new client pitch to present how the client extranet worked.
One of Elmer’s main concerns is to reduce the time she spends travelling between offices. “The plan is to make fuller use of video-conferencing,” she explains. “In the nine months that I have had European responsibility, I have been to Chicago four times, for a week on each occasion. The nice thing about Europe is that you can do most business trips from London in a day and a half.” A major expansion of the London offices has enabled Elmer to upgrade the meeting rooms, including a room dedicated to video-conferencing and a portable conferencing facility. This is part of a broader initiative to increase the bandwidth between all the offices, which Elmer considers vital because the firm’s output depends on interaction between its far-flung outposts. “We work on a global basis, so if we are dealing with a major client we can have people in Hong Kong, London, New York and Chicago all sharing documents and working around the clock before it is put together as one document,” she says. “There is a lot of bandwidth-intensive stuff involved in that.”
In the interests of integration, Bakers is also replacing disparate practice management systems across the different offices with a single system. This will allow the firm and clients to keep track of the billable time it has spent on a particular project – or all the work relating to a single
customer. “We need to access that information straight away and the old practice management systems would not do that,” she says. “We are just about the first firm to have a separate accounting system in each office linked to an inter-office billing system that transfers all the time records.” Elmer envisages making this and other information being available to clients via a secure extranet service that goes beyond the standard document exchange facility. Her team will provide a generic solution that lawyers can tailor to the client’s individual requirements.
Another project for Elmer is to set up an effective
knowledge management system. “Workflow systems help us carry out our projects more effectively and efficiently on
a global basis,” she says. “You might have precedents from all over the world so that when we are working on a major project someone in the London office can just pull in the
relevant information from all the different databases.” Bakers does not operate a financial incentive scheme to encourage its lawyers to record their know-how. Knowledge is stored on the firm-wide intranet, but incentives for
putting it there are at the discretion of the global practice group for a given legal area.
Elmer says there are less women in IT today than when
she joined the profession. About 50% in those days were women, but the sector has become characterised by an increasing gender imbalance. “When I started to use
computers at university, they were new to everyone and
no-one was saying that boys were better at it than girls,” she says. “But over the next 10 years computers became labelled as boys’ toys and the number of girls who went through school and said they wanted to go into IT
went down.” Elmer concedes that the situation is
improving, but she remains unconvinced that this is because of changes in the nature of the work. “I do not like to label women as having better interpersonal skills than men – people’s strengths and weaknesses are not related to their gender,” she says.
