IT strategy

What is your hole?

what do you want? In Management Consultant speak, what is your “key objective”?

The customer in the hardware store doesn't want a power drill. She wants a hole in the wall. (Theodore Levitt)
The question is not "could we have a chatbot" but what is the problem we are trying to solve?.

It's not just about computers

The primarily technology we deal with is legal technology. We need to simplify that before we can simplify the computer tech. - See: strategic over tactical
The first step to simplifying legal technology is to simplify the source code on which legal technology is compiled: Language
- Plain English isn't a fad or an optional extra. It's a fundamental design principle. It's easier and cheaper to code for plain English.

There is a marked lack of financial and HR resources to implement new systems:

To buy new IT (Bottom line expense)
To package/maintain/install IT (Technology resource)
To configure new IT for the firm (Technology resource)
To configure for use by legal (Legal/Technology resource)
To train users (internal Legal/Technology resource) - do not underestimate the importance and difficult of this

NB: users who are legally and technically literate are rare.

User intransigence
- technological: don’t understand/like new technology; significant change fatigue
- Technical: Our skill is creating and articulating bespoke solutions, not commoditising standard ones.
- Lawyers don’t write well. Legal drafting is convoluted, over-particularized, prone to formalistic negotiation (for the avoidance of doubt...) and error (the inevitably missing “not”)
User knowledge is imperfect
- Individuals who don’t understand policies are incentivised to apply them literally (being institutionally short an option - see below)
- Institutional Knowledge: Generally is good but we leak institutional knowledge and it is not tracked and captured.
Institutional knowledge is poor
- We don’t track our decisions - no MI kept on litigation close shaves; which issues come up and which don’t.
Legal department’s institutional position: Being a control function, Legal is “short an option”
- We are not rewarded for approving successful business;
- We are criticised for approving business which encounters any legal issues.
  - Important to differentiate legal and commercial issues and allocate ownership correctly. (e.g.: indemnities are, ultimately, commercial and not legal issues)

Data we don’t use: All historical departmental email: - a rich source of indexable institutional knowledge - this resource should not be restricted to use in conducting.
Underused/misunderstood existing tools -
- Sharepoint
- Microsoft Word/Excel
- Workshare
Opportunities to enhance/improve existing tools
Easy implementation to enhance interaction and connectivity
- “Business Data Catalogs” to interrogate external databases from within Sharepoint
- Application Interfaces (“API”s)
Open source solutions - There is a lot of good, free software available (e.g. Mediawiki)
You have to spend to save: Some technology is worth investing in.

We are in a new world, and we should upgrade our practices to take account of it: e.g. Electronic execution,

collects audited information about the time and date of execution
documente assembly naturally stores documentation and collects key metadata about the variable content of the agreements

First: clean up: it is much easier to automate a simple structure than a complicated one. Simple structures are more scalable, less prone to error.
Small projects: See above. Be unambitious. Small, unglamorous projects save resources incrementally and buy time for projects.
- e.g., Confidentiality Agreements
Co-ordinate: each project should be managed separately, but users should be encouraged to share technology, and build on each other’s work - centr