Platforms for progress

We were all pretty excited when we took the temperature of cloud consensus in our annual Briefing Frontiers Legal IT landscapes research in late 2020. Only one category of technology saw fewer than 70% of votes cast for fully/mainly cloud. We don’t just love results like this because ‘ooh big, shiny numbers’ – it means we also get to dig deeper into what it really means. And that’s what Josh Adcock turns his type to in this edition (p12). Did the year of Covid-19 lead to a striking transformation in legal’s cloud confidence? Is this a case of necessity being the mother of adoption, or have firms seen movement on certain practical hurdles that may have restrained them in the past? And if the future really is now cloud-first, what’s the priority to crack on with … well, first?

But it’s always worth pausing to remember that technology can’t solve everything. It’s an enabler, as the good saying goes, and the transformations of working life that surely still lie ahead require more than new systems. Richard Brent’s interview this month is with Jay Connolly, the global chief talent officer at Dentons (p16), who offers his take on what the very biggest of big law really also needs to get right when it comes to agile 2.0 from a people perspective.

CHANCE OF CLOUD

The pandemic may have put a spotlight on the advantages of law firms finally moving to the cloud – but what has that meant in practice and how much further is there left to go before cloud is the default? Josh Adcock investigates how firms are implementing and evaluating cloud now.

HALOS, HEROES AND HEADLINES

Leor Franks, director of business development and marketing at Kingsley Napley, lays out tips and tricks for boosting visibility among prospects, including some heroic gestures, and explains how to assess your favourability with clients in the pandemic era.

CHANGE OF SPACE

Lauren Colbeck, recently appointed head of product at Access Legal, sets out her top priorities as the business focuses on making future law firm life more productive than ever with a new technology proposition in the cloud, and explains why talking to customers is at the top of that list.