IT is Dead; Long Live IT

There is an irony to IT in law firms: Firms spend so much time on issues like IT infrastructure and upgrade projects that they spend too little time using technology to improve how lawyers work. Law firms cannot achieve real value from their technology investments until they change this model. Moreover, changing the usual model can lower overall IT spending while increasing stability and lawyer satisfaction. With our law firm IT benchmarks reflecting that the highest spending firms spend twice as much per lawyer on technology as the lowest spending firms, there is a lot to be gained by increasing technology efficiencies.

With good leadership, streamlining IT infrastructure and rebalancing attention to IT practice technologies, law firms can have real effects on productivity and client relations.

A Firm's Best IT Investment: IT Leadership

Based on the assessments of hundreds of firms, it is clear that a leading factor in the quality and value of a firm's technology is the proficiency of the IT director. A good IT director will build a solid team, communicate effectively with lawyers, plan and architect with an eye to the future, emphasize testing, be a smart purchaser and better control the firm's vendors. Every dollar poured into a good IT director or CIO pays back in terms of risk mitigation, hassle reduction and cost control ' not necessarily lower costs, but better control of spending.

Even a good IT director can become ineffective when working with technology leadership in ill-defined roles. An IT leader needs four things from the firm outside the IT Department:

1. Representative feedback from a static group or a topic-specific group;
2. Authoritative decisions;
3. Qualified advice, recommendations and planning; and
4. Advocacy.

Firms often assume a technology committee serves all four purposes. In practice, a technology committee is optional or at least in a back seat role compared to a qualified technology partner and COO.

Streamline IT; Not Just
A Little, But a Lot

It's common for a firm to spend more than 80% of its attention and IT staff time on infrastructure and less than 20% on applying technology to the practice of law. The aim of streamlining IT systems and processes should be to reverse this balance.

For IT infrastructure, the objective is straightforward: to provide a highly available foundation that requires less effort and cost to maintain. Consolidating IT systems via virtualization software (allowing multiple servers to run on each physical server machine) has been a reality for a number of years, but the actual business results are often underwhelming. IT staffs have gained initial success by reducing the firm's total number of servers and, sometimes, software licenses. These efforts are generally focused on cleaning up ancillary and older servers. Think of this as Stage 1 in streamlining IT, often with a moderate or net zero gain. Stage 1 helps IT staff gain experience with virtualization, reduce the number of servers and reduce data center needs, although these gains can be offset by the costs, complexity and initial effort.

It is possible to streamline IT systems much further and achieve a real, positive effect on reliability, recovery capabilities, IT spending and staffing levels. We call this Stage 2. This requires a focus not just on technology, but on people, process and technology within the IT department. You should expect this level of streamlining to involve upfront investments, although the net result over three years should reduce overall IT spending by at least 15% compared to traditional implementations. This is important ' if you can't map your projects to these long-term business results, then you may simply be increasing costs and complexity under the guise of “improvements.” It is easy to argue that while spending reductions are critical, of more importance are better disaster recovery, reliability and levels of lawyer satisfaction.