• The first question was ‘are self typing lawyers more cost effective than lawyers who dictate’ – which produced a resounding ‘no’ from 68% of respondents. That said, 60% did say they believed law students should be taught touch typing at law school – although we are not sure why as almost the same number (56%) said incoming trainees should not be tested for their typing ability.

• There was also an almost unanimous (83%) verdict that lawyers should not be deprived of secretaries just because they are adequate self typists, which does make sense because a good legal secretary has always done a lot more than type.

• We also asked about training, with 72% of respondents saying dictation training should become a standard part of induction at all firms, and 62% saying law firms should not teach trainees to touch type.

• Turning to future trends...
– 63% said they did not think a growing generation of computer literate lawyers would make dictation obsolete in 10 years;
– 72% said they did not think speech recognition would make dictation obsolete in 10 years; and
– 65% said they did not think speech recognition would make self typing obsolete in 10 years.

So, forget speech recognition and keep on dictating.

*And yes we realise that all technologies are transitory – however while some may have had a relatively short lifespan (like the audio cassette tape midway between vinyl albums and CDs – and yes we know CDs are themselves threathened by MP3 file downloads) – others enjoy a surprising longevity. For example, the QWERTY/Sholes keyboard was patented in 1874 to prevent the most frequently used keys on a mechanical, spring-driven typewriter keyboard from jamming. 134 years later it is still in use despite the fact the digital keyboard on a PC has no such jamming problems. (For the record, Thomas Edison invented the first dictation recorder in 1877.)
 
Support & Consultancy - how much a day (April 2008)
In our most recent poll we asked how much suppliers and consultants were charging for training, support and implementation services. We also split the questions to check out whether travel and expenses were included, and how much the rates varied between London and the South-East and the rest of the UK...

For training services in London & SE, the most widely charge rate (45%) was between £751-£950 a day, followed by £501-£750 (30%), and £301-£500 (25%). We also had one firm that was paying in excess of £951 a day. As for expenses, 65% of respondees to the survey paid travel and expenses on top of these rates. The position was broadly mirrored over the rest of the UK with 45% paying £751-£950 a day, 25% on £501-£750 and 30% on £301-£500. However out of London & SE nobody was paying more than £950 and the percentage (55%) paying expenses was also marginally lower.

For support and consultancy services, per day rates for London & SE varied from under £500 (6%) to £1501+ (also 6%) with the most widely quoted rate (44%) being £751-£1000, followed by £501-£750 (26%) and £1001-£1500 (18%). Once again, it was a similar story across the rest of the UK, with rates in the £751-£1000 bracket the most widely cited (49%) followed by £501-£750 (33%), and £1001-£1500 (12%). There was nobody charging the top rate of £1500+ however 6% were paying £500 or less per day.

For implementation services, per day rates for London & SE varied from under £500 (3%) to £1501+ (3%) with £751-£1000 once again the most widely quoted rate (47%), followed by £501-£750 (30%) and £1001-£1500 (17%). For the rest of the UK, the rates were £751-£1000 (43%), followed by £501-£750 (30%), £1001-£1500 (18%), and up to £500 (9%).

Curiously, when it comes to both support and implementation services, far more firms outside the London & SE area (60%) are charged extra for travel and expenses, compared with those (about 40%) within that zone. Could the explanation be that because so many consultancies are based in London, they are happy to make travel (in many instances only a Tube, local train or cab fare) inclusive but charge extra once their consultants are required to head into the nether regions beyond Potters Bar?

What flavour of Office (March 2008)
For our last readers’ poll we set out to discover which were the most widely used versions of Microsoft Office seeing life in law offices today. With great relief we are able to report nobody is using (or at least nobody admits to using) anything earlier than Office 2000. So goodbye Office 95 and 97. We were also pleased to see the most widely used version - used by over half the participants in the survey - is Office 2003. And, a by no means shabby take-up of Office 2007. Here are the results showing the percentages of respondents using each version of Office...
* Office 2000 (9.0) 19.4%
* Office XP (10.0) 15.3%
* Office 2003 (11.0) 52.8%
* Office 2007 (12.0) 12.5%

Sharepoint definitely, maybe (February 2008)
In our latest readers’ poll, we asked a series of questions relating to the take-up of Microsoft Sharepoint by law firms. We had 62 responses and this is what you said...

We started by asking does your firm use or plan to deploy Sharepoint? A total of 29% said it was already deployed, 48.4% said they were planning to deploy it – leaving 22.6% with no plans to deploy Sharepoint. As to what firms were using or planning to use Sharepoint for, the most popular response (45.8%) was intranets, followed by information sharing platforms (33.3%). Only 16.7% were looking to use it as a DMS platform, and a further 4.2% saw it as a process and workflow platform.

When asked if Sharepoint would become the standard for law firm intranets over the next 12 months, just over half (51.6%) agreed, a quarter (25.8%) disagreed and 22.6% proffered no opinion. We also asked if Sharepoint could become the key information search and retrieval platform for fee earners. A massive 71% agreed, with just 16.1% disagreeing – and 12.9% with no opinion.

We then asked if Sharepoint could provide a real alternative to the traditional DMS. The response was split with a quarter (26.7%) saying ‘yes’ and the same number saying ‘no’, leaving 46.7% replying ‘maybe’. However when we asked if readers thought the remaining enterprise DMS vendors would eventually create hybrid products that incorporated Sharepoint with their own systems, 48.4% said ‘yes’, 41.9% said ‘maybe’ and just 9.7% said ‘no’.

For our penultimate question, we asked firms using or planning to use Sharepoint how critical it would be to their businesses. Very critical was the response of 18.5%, another 18.5% said plain vanilla critical, 55.6% said important, leaving just 7.4% who didn’t think it was very important. Surprisingly, given this enthusiastic response, only 35.5% said Sharepoint features in current their disaster recovery/business continuity plans, leaving nearly two-thirds of firms apparently exposed risks-wise.

Law firm IT budgets - going up, down or static (Jan 2008)
Back in December, our readers' poll asked the question whether law firm IT budgets were rising or falling. In particular we wanted to know if a frequently cited statistic - that law firms spent on average 5.5% of their annual turnover on IT - was still valid.

The first question was what was last year's IT spend as a percentage of turnover, to which 12.5% said more than 8%. Unfortunately 18.8% said it was just 4%, 12.5% said it was 3%, and the largest response (31.3%) said it was less than 3%, making a total of 63% spending 4% or less. We also had 6.5% say 5%, 12.5% say 6%, and 6% say 7% of turnover. By our math, from the total results this gives an average figure of 4.45%

As for the current year, the number of firms spending less than 3% declined marginally to 25% (but this was still the largest single response) however all the other figures remained pretty much static, save for a increase to 18.8% in the number of firms saying they would be spending 3% and a decline to 12.5% in the number of firms spending 4% of their turnover on IT, to give an average of 4.5%.

In terms of predictions for the coming year, the biggest single response was one third of firms reporting planned budgets of 4% however overall other data remained broadly similar to produce an average figure of 4.53%.

All this is a long way short of the anecdotal figure of 5.5% we've heard for so long - and way below the 8.89% figure the English Law Society cited last year. In terms of percentages of turnover, over a three year period law firm IT spends are static and not even increasing in pace with inflation. The one consolation for IT suppliers is that in real terms law firm turnovers have increased, so 4.5% this year is still a better deal than 4.45% last year.

The Blackberry - critical application or gadget (Oct 2007)
We asked a series of questions to see whether the Blackberry device was still regarded as a handy gadget or had now become a business critical application for law firms.

The first finding to stand out from the results was the wide range of tasks Blackberrys are now being used for: 100% said email (no surprises there), 95.5% said calendar and scheduling, 77.3% said they also used it as a mobile phone, 9.1% said it was being used for digital dictation, 4.6% said billing and 22.7% cited accessing 'other applications'.

This topic was also discussed at the lunch hosted by the Insider and Avanquest earlier this month (November 2007) where the point was made that the ability of the latest versions of document management systems to integrate with Blackberry and effectively handle the filing of email messages had significantly boosted the status of the Blackberry from handy to critical. This view was echoed in the survey, which found that 66.7% of firms agreed that the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) must be considered a critical application for business continuity and disaster recovery purposes.

When asked how long a firm could function effectively without access to a BES, 27.3% said it would become critical after between 30 minutes and two hours; 22.7% said between two and four hours, and 41% said between eight and 24 hours. But there were also 9% who said a BES crash would have no impact on them. Given this apparent importance, it is surprising that only 50% of respondents said their Blackberry infrastructure was part of their firms' current DR and business continuity strategies. There again, the BES does seem robust, with 50% of respondents saying they had suffered no server failures over the past 12 months, and 45.5% saying they had only lost user connectivity on between one and five occasions.

We also asked about the size of Blackberry installations at law firms, with 32% of respondents saying they had between 200 and 500 Blackberrys, 4.6% had between 500 and 1000 Blackberry devices, and 9.1% had 1000 plus. There again 22.7% had between 50 and 200 and 31% had less than 50. In terms of Blackberry Enterprise Servers, 68.2% had just one BES server, 18.2% had between 2 and 5, and 13.6% had more than 5 servers.

Finally we asked who got the Blackberrys in your firms. The most popular answer (45.5%) was all partners & fee earners who ask and only 9.1% said all partners & fee earners. However 18.2% said support & support staff would receive Blackberrys and 22.7% said "anyone who asks". But we did also have 4.6% of respondents who said only partners got them.

The debate over lunch also revealed the interesting fact that while many firms had a notional policy of optional Blackberrys (in otherwords you could have one if you wanted one) fee earners and trainees who did not ask for a Blackberry, subsequently did so because they felt it was viewed as demonstrating a lack of commitment to the firm and so constitute a black mark against their name when it came to their next appraisal/review. The view at lunch was that the cultural issues surrounding the use of Blackberrys had not been properly addressed, with both clients and lawyers falling into the trap of feeling that because it was always-on 24/7 technology, they ought to respond to incoming messages on a 24/7 basis. Another comment was the fact that along with taking their Blackberrys on holiday, it was also now common to see people checking their Blackberrys during meetings and conferences when they should have been concentrating on other matters.

Two other points to come out of the lunch were that: while billing was a popular application to run on the Blackberry, it was probably fairer to say it was the reporting side of these systems (how much WIP relates to this client, how much have we billed them in the past, how much do they owe us etc) rather than mobile time recording, that was the most widely used feature. And, it was also suggested that the reason for the relatively poor take-up of Windows Mobile etc devices was that most lawyers do not have a need to create or edit Word or any other Microsoft Office documents on a PDA - not least because of the pokey screens - and so where happy to stick with their almost idiot-proof Blackberrys. As one IT director pointed out: as long as they receive the message and know the document is available (and which they can at least now read on a Blackberry) they don't need all the functionality (and complexity) of Windows Mobile.

All about VoIP (Jul 2007)
Over the past couple of months we have been asking what your plans are - if any - for embracing VoIP and IP telephony. technology. Among law firms, 42% of those responding said they already had some form of VoIP/IP infrastructure in place and 56% said they were planning to implement it, which leaves just 2% who are presumably happy still using dolls-eye switchboards. As to the timing of any VoIP migration, the position is not quite so clear cut, with 40% saying it was planned over the next 12 months and a further 20% committing over the next couple of years. But the remaining 40% admitted it was planned 'sometime/one day', which tends to suggest it may be on many firms' wish-lists but not in their budgets.

We also asked those firms with VoIP whether they would recommend their supplier to another firm. This yielded a not exactly ringing endorsement with 57% saying they would but 43% saying they would not. This reflects the comment we heard from one firm who said the VoIP market was the latest IT prairie to provide a home for cowboys. And, talking of VoIP service providers, our survey also revealed that only 25% of suppliers had been in the market for longer than 3 years and 50% had been involved for less than 12 months. If it is any consolation, one third of suppliers who currently do not provide VoIP services are planning to introduce them in the near future.

Escrow - what is it good for? (Apr 2007)
We asked readers what they thought about escrow agreements, this is what you said: Among law firms, 69% said they had escrow agreements in place with their software suppliers, while 31% did not. However of those firms with escrow agreements, only 7.7% reckoned it covered all their systems, while 92.3% made do with just some coverage. When it came to buying new software, 37.5% of firms described the availability of escrow as 'moderately important' (nobody felt it was very important) and 67.5% of you said it was unimportant.

This finding was echoed in the answers to the following question, with only 25% of respondents saying they'd be willing to pay an extra amount in annual support charges for an escrow agreement. We also asked if readers understood the difference between source code and a software application - and 100% of respondents said they did. There again the Insider does have a specialist readership, as witnessed by the fact 68% said they had people in their organisations with the skills to work on source code.

There were also some questions specifically for suppliers: We asked if suppliers offered escrow - 40% said they offered it to everyone, 40% said they only offered it to those who asked and 20% said they never offered escrow. None of the suppliers said they offered escrow as a chargeable extra. We also asked how frequently the issue of escrow arose in sales negotiations - 40% said sometimes, 60% said rarely. No suppliers ticked the other options of 'all the time' and 'never' however 20% did say they had been in situations where the availability of escrow had been crucial to winning an order. Finally, the NCC came out as the most widely used organisation with which to lodge source code, used by 75% of suppliers responding to the survey.

The Legal IT Factor (Mar 2007)
With wall-to-wall reality TV on the box, we thought we'd organise our own homage to the genre, the snappily titled I'm a Legal Technology Celebrity, get me out of the Big Brother House because I have the IT Factor and provide readers with an opportunity to vote for their favourite legal technology celebrity - with a selection of 10 to pick from. It turned out to be our most popular poll ever.

When the votes were counted, in reverse order, the wooden spoon award is shared by Liam Flanagan of Tikit and Rob Lancashire of nFlow who both polled 4% of the votes. Julie Berry of RPC, Ann Elia of Travers Smith, PR maestro Sally Bellwood and Jeremy Hill of the Legal Tech Awards all scored in the 5-to-7% range. Nathan Hayes of Osborne Clarke - now rated the sharpest dressed man in legal IT - came in third place with 10% of the vote. In joint second place - each scoring 18% of the total votes - are Jan Durant of Lewis Silkin and Ann Hemming of LexisNexis Butterworths. And the winner, with 28% of the vote, is the original godfather of the legal IT sales world: Harry Townsend of Thomson Elite.

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IT budgets in 2007 (Jan 2007)
Last month we asked law firms whether their IT budgets for the coming year would be going up, coming down or remaining the same. The poll, which generated one of the biggest turnouts of the year, produced one very clear answer – namely nearly 69% of respondents said their budgets would be increasing. The bad news is 37.5% said they would only be increasing marginally. The good news is 31.3% of you said your budgets would be increasing ‘significantly’.

As for the remainder... 22.9% said their budgets would be staying the same and just 8.3% said they would be decreasing. Compared with previous years, the proportion of firms facing a decrease is lower than usual, whereas on the increase side, one interpretation of a ‘marginal’ increase is that it means budgets are frozen but with an allowance for inflation. That still leaves nearly a third of firms with a significantly increased budget to spend. When we polled the subject last year, about 58% of firms said their spending priority was infrastructure, with email security and business continuity taking priority. And 42% said their focus would be new or upgrades to existing software applications.
 
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Buzzword bingo (Dec 2006)
Last month we asked readers whether you had heard of some of the latest IT buzzwords doing the rounds – and if you understood what the jargon meant. Podcasting was the most popular with a 100% recognition rate and 83% claiming to understand it. Next was KPI (key performance indicators) which 73% had heard of – and of these 67% felt they understood. Matter centricity scored 70% but only 57% of these said they understood it. Then came virtualisation, which 27% of you had never heard of – and only 50% of those who had heard of it understood. In last place was ERP (enterprise resource planning), which 33% had never heard of and 53% who had heard of it, did not understand. Looks like the marketing departments of some IT suppliers need to go back to the drawing board. For our next poll we are asking law firms whether their IT budgets for 2007 are going up, down or staying the same.
 
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How big is your email in-box (Nov 2006)
Last time we asked whether you were a hoarder or a deleter when it came to managing the number of email messages in your in-box.

When asked how quickly you deal with a new message, 64% of you said you try to read, answer and file or delete it as soon as possible, 4% said within an hour, 14% said by the end of the working day, 4% said by the end of the week, and 14% said they hoped to do it someday soon. Next, we asked how many unread emails would typically still be found in your in-box at the end of the working day. This time 64% (we suspect the same 64%) said the box would be empty, 28% said between 1-to-10 messages, and 7% said there would be more than 50 unread messages.

When however it came to messages that had been read, then the results suggest there are far more hoarders than deleters in the legal IT world. A mere 7% said there would be zero messages left in the in-box, 21% said on average between 1 and 25 messages, 29% said more than 25 but less than 100, leaving 43% with more than 100 read messages left in the in-box. Before you get too complacent we need to look at those with more than 100+ messages in a little more detail. Looking at the survey results as a whole, 21% admitted to having more than 1000 messages in their in-box and 4% confessed to having more than 5000!

This month our focus is on buzzword bingo – have you even heard of some of the jargon now widely being used (matter centricity, virtualisation etc) never mind whether you understand what it means?
 
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What we did on our holidays (Oct 2006)
This summer we asked readers what they did during the holiday season. We’re glad to report that over 74% of readers participating in the survey said taking time off for a vacation to relax and pursue leisure interests. And we were highly impressed that 68% of you did not take a laptop or Blackberry with you on holiday, which is a far higher proportion of refuseniks than we expected. That still leaves 32% who spent the summer trying to keep the sand out of their disk drives and looking for wi-fi hotspots but there again 22% of you also spent some of the summer visiting international conferences and exhibitions, such as ILTA.

So what else did you do? Just over 43% said they used the quiet summer period to catch-up on IT housekeeping projects and upgrades; 48% said they planned their new projects and initiatives for the coming 12 months; and an admirable 62% said they spent time thinking about the meaning of life and what their next career move should be.

Following reports that one US attorney has 27,893 messages in his in-box, for our next readers poll we are prying into the secrets of your email. Are you a ‘hoarder’ who keeps everything or a ‘deleter’ who tries to file, reply-to or delete messages as they come in.
 
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Confused by HIPs? (May 2006)
Last month we asked readers if they were confused by the developments surrounding HIPs and who should take the lead in educating the market? The good news is 60% said they were up to speed – but that still leaves 40% of you wondering what is going on in the face of the biggest change to residential conveyancing for decades. 40% of you said the Law Society should do more to educate the market, 30% said the onus was on the government and 30% said the software industry could do more.

In this month’s readers’ poll we follow up on a recent report which found that people working in IT now suffer one of the highest levels of stress of any vocational group. So do you find your job in IT stressful? And which factors contribute to your stress levels?
 
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Just how important is end of lifing? (Apr 2006)
How important is software end-of-lifing these days? We asked how long had you been running your current desktop operating systems? 24% said you’d been running your current O/S for less than 12 months, 55% said between 2 & 3 years, and 21% said between 4 & 5 years. We also asked when you planned to upgrade it? Here, 12% said they had just done so, 27% expected to do so within the next 12 months, 23% said within the next 2-to-3 years, and 38% of you said you had no immediate plans.

With developments in HIPs and e-conveyancing systems being announced almost weekly, we are asking firms with residential property practices: have you any clue what is going on? And, who do you think should be doing more to educate the market – the Law Society, the Government or the legal
 
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Which factors influence you most? (Mar 2006)
For last month’s Insider online survey, we asked which information sources did law firms and inhouse legal departments rate most highly when they were looking for new IT systems? In joint first place (and streets ahead of anything else) as ‘very important’ sources were feedback from other firms and internet research & webinars. Rated as ‘moderately important’ were industry reports & buyers guides, followed by consultant’s recommendations and then vendor presentations & roadshows. Finally, the sources most people rated as ‘not important’ were exhibitions and conferences. Consultants were runners up among the least important sources and nobody described consultant’s recommendations as ‘very important’.

Microsoft’s next version of Windows – Vista – is now on the horizon, while in June the company is ending support for Windows 98 and ME. But just how important is end-of-lifing these days? In this month’s survey we ask: how long have you been running your current desktop operating system and when do you plan to upgrade it?
 
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To outsource or keep inhouse? (Feb 2006)
For last month’s Insider online survey, we asked whether electronic disclosure/e-discovery is a core function that should be kept inhouse or outsourced to external litigation support bureaux. Only 8% of you said you would keep it totally inhouse, 46% said outsourcing was the way to go and the remaining 46% said they would opt for a combination of inhouse and outsourced facilities. Interestingly nobody said they would base their choice on whatever was the cheapest option.

Despite the success of the recent Legal IT event in London, we still keep hearing that thanks to so much information now being available on the internet, the days of the traditional exhibition are over. So, this month we are asking what sources of information do law firms and inhouse legal departments rate the most highly when they are looking for new IT systems? Exhibitions? Consultants? Buyers guides? Supplier presentations? The internet? Word of mouth from other firms?
 
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We want Blackberrys (Dec 2005)
For last month’s poll, we asked readers which technology they had found the most useful over the past 12 months: digital dictation or mobile email devices such as the Blackberry? The results were the most clear-cut we have to-date, with 60% opting for the Blackberry and only 40% voting in favour of digital dictation. Perhaps the gold rush days of the digital dictation boom are coming to a close?

This month we ask what has priority in your 2006 IT budgets: Microsoft .NET, email & online security or upgrades to/new legal software applications.
 
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Microsoft rules OK? (Nov 2005)
Last month we asked the question: if Microsoft were to move into the small business software market and offer applications such as accounts, CRM and document management suitable for law firms, would you (a) still continue buying specialist legal systems or (b) switch over to Microsoft? The poll found that 45% of you would immediately opt for Microsoft whereas 55% would stick with your current suppliers – although whether this is out of loyalty or a greater fear of Microsoft was not clear.

This month we are asking which technology have you found the most useful over the past 12 months: digital dictation or mobile email devices such as the Blackberry?
 
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Which PDF? (Oct 2005)
Through our new online survey facility, the Insider has been running a readers poll for the past month asking the question: which version of Adobe Acrobat do you use to read PDF files? We were interested, as we wanted to ensure we made the PDF edition of the Insider as accessible as possible and, when we asked Adobe they didn’t know the answer, so we decided to find out for ourselves. The results are now in: 46% of you use Acrobat version 6, 39% use the latest version 7, 15% use version 5 and nobody uses version 4 anymore. Thank you.

This month we ask... if Microsoft were to move into the small business systems market and offer applications such as accounts, CRM and document management that were suitable for law firms, would you (a) still continue buying specialist legal systems or (b) switch to the Microsoft products?