This post was originally published on the HighQ Solutions blog.

I have recently returned from a trip to Sydney where I was one of the speakers at the Janders Dean Law Firm Knowledge Management Conference. I also took the time to meet with several law firms and banks while I was there and was lucky enough to meet many people who showed me that Australian firms are doing some very interesting stuff. I was particularly impressed by Mallesons’ work on their PeopleFinder 2.0 project which ties together multiple internal systems and presents project, billing and matter data for fee earners.

I was asked to speak around the topic “The UK Magic Circle – Innovators, Disruptors or Just Different?” which suited my experience well having worked for and/or with most of the large UK firms since 2004. I decided to focus on the innovation aspect first and look at a few examples of some of the more interesting projects various UK firms have undertaken in the past decade or so in the web / online space. The slides from my talk are embedded at the end of this post and what follows is a summary of what I spoke about.

Innovation over the last decade

If you look back to the late 90s, Linklaters launched Blue Flag and Simmons & Simmons launched elexica. Both were innovative for their time and showed that genuinely progressive, useful legal services could be delivered through the web (and still are). In fact, a lot of firms still haven’t got this and are yet to catch up with where these firms were 10 years ago in terms of online services.

Moving further ahead to 2004, the next interesting development was the BLT Portal, something I was closely involved with in my time at Freshfields. This was the first time that a group of clients got together and “asked” their law firms to provide a joined up service. The result was the five founding firms (Freshfields, Linklaters, Clifford Chance, Allen & Overy and Simmons & Simmons) asked HighQ Solutions to build a portal where they could all publish their current awareness and know-how so the banks could access it all from one place. This principal of ease of access to the firms’ collective content is still one that we see driving the industry today, as the BLT Portal only partially solved the problem.

In 2005, Allen & Overy started experimenting internally with social tools for group collaboration. At that time, they were well ahead of the curve with wikis and blogs only really becoming mainstream in the last couple of years. It was a great success and they soon found that their sites were being accessed firm-wide by most staff. They also extended the sites to include external collaboration spaces for client relationship management, again with great success. These sites are still going strong today.

When I was at Freshfields in 2006, we decided to outsource the development of our new extranet platform to HighQ. This was another important moment as the standard approach up until that time was for firms to build these kinds of solutions themselves internally. Freshfields was the first major firm to outsource the development, hosting and management to a third party “cloud” provider. Since then, many firms have followed suit, with well over 20 firms now using our dealroom and collaboration platform, SitePoint. The following year, Freshfields took the decision to replace their static intranet with a Confluence-based wiki. Again, the easy option would have been to use SharePoint or some other well known intranet CMS but using a wiki provided a lightweight and relatively simple solution.

Clifford Chance took a similar approach to outsourcing with their entire online services platform in 2008. They engaged with HighQ to replace their existing infrastructure for delivering their publications, alerters and cross border guides with one integrated, hosted solution. It dramatically reduced their infrastructure and maintenance costs and enabled them to easily offer more innovative online services. It was this project that gave birth to HighQ Publisher.

The final example is Simmons & Simmons’ navigator product. They have been innovating with their online services since they launched elexica but navigator was really a new stage and it is a very profitable, premium legal service which disrupted other players offering similar services both on and offline due to its aggressive pricing and highly valued content. It’s a great example of how we’re seeing commoditisation of legal services and the shift to providing them online.

Converging paths

All of these examples are great in their own right but the innovation has been happening in parallel, rather than as an integrated approach to dealrooms, extranets, relationship management, collaboration, the provision of know-how, current awareness and online services in general.

Now, in 2010, with the trend towards cloud-based solutions, social computing and fully-managed, outsourced services, we’re seeing convergence in these areas. So rather than needing five or six platforms to do all of these things, you’ll only need one or two. At HighQ, we’re developing our products so that they encompass all of these areas to make the provision of an integrated suite of online services a reality.

Integrated online services and deeper client relationships

What started in different ways a few years ago with Allen & Overy, Freshfields and Clifford Chance is now developing into a major area of innovation for firms. We are working with a number of top tier firms to completely overhaul their online services offerings, including the provision of their extranets, publishing and marketing platforms, premium online products and customised client portals. We’ve built features such as client dashboards, content personalisation, microsites, video channels and more to enable them to do this.

One of the principle aims of these projects is to build much deeper client relationships and open the firms up to a dialogue with their clients. It’s not enough any more to simply publish read-only documents in an extranet; clients want to be able to collaborate, participate and interact with their firms; they want to be able to see a personalised view of the firm’s know-how, products and services.

To help build and support these more meaningful relationships, we’ve added features such as wikis, blogs, group tasks and events, activity streams, comments, tags, personal profiles and more to enable collaboration, interaction, content discovery and networking.

Challenges in the legal sector

Some of these things firms have been doing are innovative but when looking forward to the next big thing, I think it’s important to consider the context of the current challenges in the legal sector.

We’ve still got significant economic uncertainty, pressure to reduce costs internally and trends towards greater outsourcing and commoditisation of legal services. Clients are ever more demanding – they want more added value services, personalised content, more transparency, alternative billing and reduced fees.

And there are still the familiar internal problems of building and managing your own solutions – they’re costly, time consuming and inefficient; they suffer from internal budget and resource constraints (not to mention the political wrangling) and ultimately why does a law firm want to be a development house? All the firms need the same things, so why all go and build the same systems over and over again, duplicating each others’ efforts?

Cloud-based solutions

Cloud computing offers solutions to these problems. Cloud-based services are hosted and managed for you. One of the key advantages is that you can rapidly deploy and scale the solutions to meet your needs. The products already exist, so there’s no lead time to develop them and no up front capital costs for servers or equipment because the hosting is part of the solution.

These cloud solutions bring economies of scale because once you manage the infrastructure for a few clients, it’s easy to add more very efficiently. That means it ends up being much more cost effective for you, with a simple annual subscription and very low maintenance costs.

Disruptive innovation – dare to be different

So in this context, I think what we have seen the firms do so far is only the tip of the iceberg. Some firms have done some innovative things over the last few years, some of which have been mildly disruptive but in my view those that dare to be different and get it right over the next 5 years will be able to gain a significant advantage, differentiate their firm’s offerings from their competitors’, respond to their clients’ needs and, ultimately, disrupt their markets. I think we’ve only just begun.

The full slides from my talk can be found below.

Social Business Design is the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture. 

Its goal: helping organizations improve value exchange among constituents. 

Social Business Design uses a framework of four mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive archetypes: ecosystem, hivemind, dynamic signal, and metafilter. This model can be applied to improve customer participation, workforce collaboration, and business partner optimization. Doing so provides insight to help measure and manage business to produce improved and emergent outcomes.

I've recently started a 2-day per week consulting assignment inside a large City corporate. It's like travelling back in time 3 years for me, I haven't worked in that kind of environment since I left Freshfields. It's also quite interesting because since that time I have been consulting on social computing and working with clients to help them introduce new social tools and better ways of working; so this is a bit of an eye opener from back on the inside.

When you work in a small company, wearing jeans and t-shirts and using a Mac, it's very easy to lose perspective and forget the reality of the corporate environment. You forget just how different things are and the cultural and technological restrictions that people work under. People like me, who call themselves [insert meme here] consultants, are not representative of the average employee inside these organisations. We are complete exceptions and what we think is best or the way we like to work, is not necessarily the best way for people inside these organisations to work. They don't know or care about the latest social network, open-source platform, disruptive technology or pretty much anything that we tweet, blog or otherwise evangelise about. In some ways, they are in an ignorant state of contentment; simply because very few of them have ever experienced any other ways of working.

On the first day of my assignment I was given an office and a PC but I immediately felt unproductive. No Skype. No wiki. No Safari. No Firefox. No IM. No Twitter. No Mac. Just Windows XP, IE7, Office 2003 and some 90s style web applications. Of course, this is normal in the corporate environment, it's not that their systems are bad as such, just normal. In fact, I was a little surprised to find IE7, not IE6 and a quick call to the IT help desk and I was able to get Office Communications Server (OCS) set-up, allowing me to use IM, VoIP and video chats over the network (only internally though, not externally). This was pleasantly surprising. In fact, the IT department there are generally pretty good and quite forward thinking.

I do find the combination of XP, Outlook, Word and IE7 horrifically painful though. I want to be able to quickly draft thoughts and ideas on a wiki and share them with my colleagues on the project who can then make amendments or add comments. Instead you have to use Word, email them through Outlook and wait for a new version to be sent back in Word. I want to set up a Skype group chat, at least I do have OCS but it's not as good. The PC was so slow and the monitor small. Everything was slowing me down. Unfortunately, this is normal inside the corporate firewall.

I did resort to using my MacBook Pro for mind mapping, diagram drawing, note taking and other things that didn't require internet connectivity. But I am going to have to stick with the PC for the bulk of my work there because it's the only way I can get my email, communicate with others on the network and access the company systems. But having to use the PC reminds me that people are not all Mac using, social computing geeks and that corporate environments are still, relatively speaking, old fashioned and stuck in another era of computing.

However, it does reinforce my belief that we badly need to introduce new and improved tools to enable people to work much more effectively and efficiently. For most of these organisations it's going to be a slow transformation, we can't just wave a magic wand and change their business. They will have to take small steps towards, what must be for them, quite a scary new way of working. It's not going to be easy. But the very fact that I am in there working with them to try and implement new tools and address some of these problems is very encouraging indeed.