Author: Charles Christian
Charles Christian is a legal IT commentator and speaker with over 30 years knowledge of the industry. He is publisher and editor of the Legal IT Insider global legal tech industry newsletter. Twitter @ChristianUncut.
Law firms still not proactively investing in IT?
It is now nearly 20 years ago since my book Legal Practice in the Digital Age was first published. The book’s central theme was that despite all the money law firms were spending on technology in those days, most of this money (money which might otherwise be going to partners) was being spent on the wrong stuff. […]
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Time to reopen the CAPEX v OPEX debate
While any discussions about legal technology inevitably have a strong focus on what sort of technology law firms and legal service providers should be buying and how best to then handle the rollout to get lawyers actually using it, the issue of how to pay for it tends to be ignored. All too often firms […]
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The end of disruption?
One of the topics on the agenda for the LexThink.1 event, which takes place in Chicago on the 26th March (presenters are chosen by a popular vote and each get six minutes to speak with 20 slides automatically forwarding every 18 seconds) is titled The End of Richard Susskind. The speaker, Will Hornsby, explains “Modern-day […]
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Is Microsoft the new diesel?
There has been a lot of talk in recent months about how we are moving into the post-Windows age, when the Microsoft Windows platform, which has dominated the PC operating systems market for over 20 years starts to fade into the annals of IT history (if we begin with the first iteration to gain a […]
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Content is king but curation wears the crown
Back in 1977, the Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon warned about the dangers of a looming information-rich world in which “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. Another variation of this warning is “we are data rich but information poor” – or as my old Granny used to say, “You can’t see the wood […]
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Document automation and knowledge management – preaching but not converting
The biggest successes in law office automation have always been the no-brainers. Projects where the benefits of the new technologies (such as wordprocessing and digital dictation) are so obvious they outweigh any reservations and are embraced by users without a fight – not least because they don’t seek to supplant the end-user but merely bring […]
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Time for a Campaign for Real SaaS?
From time-to-time the legal IT industry hits a tipping point when almost overnight a new paradigm sweeps into the market and permanently disrupts the previous status quo. One of the best known examples was in the mid-to-late 1990s when the industry standard of green-screen Unix systems was challenged by the rise of Microsoft Windows and […]
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Disruptive technologies – you ain’t seen nothing yet!
Over the last couple of years there has been a lot of debate in the legal IT world about the “consumerisation” of technology and, in particular BYOD (Bring/Buy Your Own Device). Or, to put it another way, how to cope with equity partners who demand they be able to access all their files on an […]
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Cloud technology platforms – it’s a legal matter
Delia Venables, Nick Holmes and I go back a long way (remember the old Law Society LOMAT guides Delia, or Computers for Lawyers from Longmans, Nick?) so it’s a great pleasure to be invited to write something for the online version of the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers. By way of background, at about the same […]
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