A RECENT PLC survey suggests that in-house lawyers are steadily increasing their use of IT but are not convinced that law firms’ technology investments are sufficiently focused on delivering value to clients (www.practicallaw.com/9-202-2901). The survey includes illustrations of legal departments using IT imaginatively and productively — Cisco, Barclays and National Grid, for example. Generally, however, greater uptake of technology is inhibited by three factors. The first is lack of investment, which is lower, lawyer for lawyer, than in law firms, even if the latter’s is too inward-focused (leading firms spend, on average, 7 per cent of their fee income on IT). A second is that in-house lawyers tend to be offered little insight by their own corporate technologists into what is possible now and likely soon. The IT director in a leading manufacturing company, for example, will rarely have interest in legal applications of technology; and relatively few in-house departments, as yet, have a dedicated IT specialist. Finally, legal IT is unproven in many organisations because it has not yet been brought to bear in tackling the big challenges facing in-house lawyers, such as legal risk management and compliance.

A NEW set of standards has been published to help parties to disputes to exchange disclosure documents in electronic form. Weightily called the Data Exchange Protocol (Part 1), this has been prepared by the energetic Litigation Support Technology Group (www.listgroup.org). This initiative should be warmly welcomed. Increasingly, in litigation, pertinent documents have been originated on computer and so are stored somewhere in electronic form. If the documents are in electronic form, their exchange can sensibly progress as a data processing exercise. The purpose of the protocol is to lay out best practice for precisely this exercise.

ONE OF the joys of the internet is that it enables users to drop into world-class lectures when they can’t attend in person. This should be the essence of e-learning — having ready access to insight and ideas that cannot be offered through conventional educational channels. In this spirit, all lawyers should point their browsers at the Oxford Internet Institute where Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the web, presents his vision of the future of the web, while Jonathan Zittrain does similarly in his inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation (http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk). Edification is but a couple of clicks away.

The author lectures and consults internationally. He is IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice and Honorary Professor at Gresham College. He can be contacted through www.susskind.com

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