Better behaviours

So it appears to be one more point to ‘team machine’ in the fierce battle waging over who’s going to be doing all the hard work in the future. I refer, of course, to those ever-advancing rows of artificially intelligent players eager to replace your feebly human – however professionally-trained – fingertips. Why bring it up? Two reasons. In this month’s great content mix we finally get around to reviewing The Future of the Professions (how technology will transform the work of human experts) by Professor Richard and Daniel Susskind.

If that’s not enough, our cover story takes a dive into the world of continuous improvement
(coincidentally, the subject of last month’s book review). That’s all about finding incremental efficiency gains. Improving the quality of your end product, sure – but also, let’s be frank, doing stuff cheaper. The formula behind predictive coding seems to be that having higher-skilled folk ‘training’ software to appreciate the relevance of something is ultimately a more cost-effective route than having many more junior lawyers slogging away at documents for that much longer.

BETTER BEHAVIOURS

Law firms may have more in common with the whirlwind world of maufacturing than they think. Can legal business learn from business process in manufacturing and retail – or even actual rocket science – when it comes to learning to make the daily grind of law firms smoother and smoother?

CLIENT FACES

The IT director at Taylor Wessing has a team around him that he can take anywhere – even out to clients. The IT team are each experts in their own right, which gives them extra value to clients as well as the firm.

RESETTING STORAGE

A new centre in Northern Ireland is backing up iManage’s mission to provide law firms with a holistic approach to the data governance of huge volumes of sensitive client documents and emails, says Neil Araujo.