One Global Desktop? Never Happen

The former IT director of Herbert Smith, the large UK firm, evaluates the state of the art on the lawyer's desktop, and finds it deeply unsatisfactory.

I told you that "lawyers live in Outlook," and evidently that's more true than most people suspect—to the point where many lawyers refuse to live anywhere else.  Why alarm at the state of the art?  As O.W. Holmes famously said, "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience."  Well, today's desktop is a product of experience, not logic.

As lawyers required or suggested more and more IT tools (document management, matter tracking, time sheets, billing, contact lists, email itself, etc.), IT departments responded, in general, by researching the "best of breed" application on the market and installing it.  The problem becomes, of course, that none of these applications: (a) communicate with each other [certainly not out of the box]; (b) look or feel like each other; nor are they (c) intuitive enough to learn that a lawyer, who won't sacrifice a billable hour for a training session, actually has a chance of figuring them out.

The result is tremendous power unused.

Now, at last, some of the IT vendors are beginning to talk with one another, and some large firms (Herbert Smith being the obvious example du jour) are insisting on integration, or at least on the technical prerequisites for integration.

This guy has identified a genuine problem.  Ultimately, what transactional/corporate lawyers need is essentially Outlook plus Word (with a bit of document management in the background); what research/litigation lawyers need is document management plus a rich "portal."  My suggestion:  Two screens on every desk.   One global view of everything needed is unrealistic.  Just look at any trading floor.