Readers poll Each month
the Insider runs an online poll to find out what
readers think about some of the key issues facing
the legal IT world, we've now gathered together
an archive of the results of these surveys.
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Know-how
resources
The site hosts a growing collection of white papers,
case studies, buyers guides and downloads. All documents
are free of charge to view.
Support & Consultancy -
how much a day (April 2008)
In our most recent poll we asked how much
suppliers and consultants were charging for
training, support and implementation services.
We also split the questions to check out whether
travel and expenses were included, and how
much the rates varied between London and the
South-East and the rest of the UK...
For training services in London & SE,
the most widely charge rate (45%) was between
£751-£950 a day, followed by £501-£750
(30%), and £301-£500 (25%). We
also had one firm that was paying in excess
of £951 a day. As for expenses, 65%
of respondees to the survey paid travel and
expenses on top of these rates. The position
was broadly mirrored over the rest of the
UK with 45% paying £751-£950 a
day, 25% on £501-£750 and 30%
on £301-£500. However out of London
& SE nobody was paying more than £950
and the percentage (55%) paying expenses was
also marginally lower.
For support and consultancy services, per
day rates for London & SE varied from
under £500 (6%) to £1501+ (also
6%) with the most widely quoted rate (44%)
being £751-£1000, followed by
£501-£750 (26%) and £1001-£1500
(18%). Once again, it was a similar story
across the rest of the UK, with rates in the
£751-£1000 bracket the most widely
cited (49%) followed by £501-£750
(33%), and £1001-£1500 (12%).
There was nobody charging the top rate of
£1500+ however 6% were paying £500
or less per day.
For implementation services, per day rates
for London & SE varied from under £500
(3%) to £1501+ (3%) with £751-£1000
once again the most widely quoted rate (47%),
followed by £501-£750 (30%) and
£1001-£1500 (17%). For the rest
of the UK, the rates were £751-£1000
(43%), followed by £501-£750 (30%),
£1001-£1500 (18%), and up to £500
(9%).
Curiously, when it comes to both support and
implementation services, far more firms outside
the London & SE area (60%) are charged
extra for travel and expenses, compared with
those (about 40%) within that zone. Could
the explanation be that because so many consultancies
are based in London, they are happy to make
travel (in many instances only a Tube, local
train or cab fare) inclusive but charge extra
once their consultants are required to head
into the nether regions beyond Potters Bar?
What
flavour of Office (March 2008)
For
our last readers’ poll we set out to
discover which were the most widely used versions
of Microsoft Office seeing life in law offices
today. With great relief we are able to report
nobody is using (or at least nobody admits
to using) anything earlier than Office 2000.
So goodbye Office 95 and 97. We were also
pleased to see the most widely used version
- used by over half the participants in the
survey - is Office 2003. And, a by no means
shabby take-up of Office 2007. Here are the
results showing the percentages of respondents
using each version of Office...
* Office 2000 (9.0) 19.4%
* Office XP (10.0) 15.3%
* Office 2003 (11.0) 52.8%
* Office 2007 (12.0) 12.5%
Sharepoint
definitely, maybe (February 2008)
In our latest readers’ poll, we asked
a series of questions relating to the take-up
of Microsoft Sharepoint by law firms. We had
62 responses and this is what you said...
We
started by asking does your firm use or plan
to deploy Sharepoint? A total of 29% said
it was already deployed, 48.4% said they were
planning to deploy it – leaving 22.6%
with no plans to deploy Sharepoint. As to
what firms were using or planning to use Sharepoint
for, the most popular response (45.8%) was
intranets, followed by information sharing
platforms (33.3%). Only 16.7% were looking
to use it as a DMS platform, and a further
4.2% saw it as a process and workflow platform.
When asked if Sharepoint would become the
standard for law firm intranets over the next
12 months, just over half (51.6%) agreed,
a quarter (25.8%) disagreed and 22.6% proffered
no opinion. We also asked if Sharepoint could
become the key information search and retrieval
platform for fee earners. A massive 71% agreed,
with just 16.1% disagreeing – and 12.9%
with no opinion.
We then asked if Sharepoint could provide
a real alternative to the traditional DMS.
The response was split with a quarter (26.7%)
saying ‘yes’ and the same number
saying ‘no’, leaving 46.7% replying
‘maybe’. However when we asked
if readers thought the remaining enterprise
DMS vendors would eventually create hybrid
products that incorporated Sharepoint with
their own systems, 48.4% said ‘yes’,
41.9% said ‘maybe’ and just 9.7%
said ‘no’.
For our penultimate question, we asked firms
using or planning to use Sharepoint how critical
it would be to their businesses. Very critical
was the response of 18.5%, another 18.5% said
plain vanilla critical, 55.6% said important,
leaving just 7.4% who didn’t think it
was very important. Surprisingly, given this
enthusiastic response, only 35.5% said Sharepoint
features in current their disaster recovery/business
continuity plans, leaving nearly two-thirds
of firms apparently exposed risks-wise.
Law
firm IT budgets - going up, down or static
(Jan 2008)
Back in December, our readers' poll asked
the question whether law firm IT budgets were
rising or falling. In particular we wanted
to know if a frequently cited statistic -
that law firms spent on average 5.5% of their
annual turnover on IT - was still valid.
The
first question was what was last year's IT
spend as a percentage of turnover, to which
12.5% said more than 8%. Unfortunately 18.8%
said it was just 4%, 12.5% said it was 3%,
and the largest response (31.3%) said it was
less than 3%, making a total of 63% spending
4% or less. We also had 6.5% say 5%, 12.5%
say 6%, and 6% say 7% of turnover. By our
math, from the total results this gives an
average figure of 4.45%
As for the current year, the number of firms
spending less than 3% declined marginally
to 25% (but this was still the largest single
response) however all the other figures remained
pretty much static, save for a increase to
18.8% in the number of firms saying they would
be spending 3% and a decline to 12.5% in the
number of firms spending 4% of their turnover
on IT, to give an average of 4.5%.
In terms of predictions for the coming year,
the biggest single response was one third
of firms reporting planned budgets of 4% however
overall other data remained broadly similar
to produce an average figure of 4.53%.
All this is a long way short of the anecdotal
figure of 5.5% we've heard for so long - and
way below the 8.89% figure the English Law
Society cited last year. In terms of percentages
of turnover, over a three year period law
firm IT spends are static and not even increasing
in pace with inflation. The one consolation
for IT suppliers is that in real terms law
firm turnovers have increased, so 4.5% this
year is still a better deal than 4.45% last
year.
The
Blackberry - critical application or gadget
(Oct 2007)
We asked a series of questions to see whether
the Blackberry device was still regarded as
a handy gadget or had now become a business
critical application for law firms.
The
first finding to stand out from the results
was the wide range of tasks Blackberrys are
now being used for: 100% said email (no surprises
there), 95.5% said calendar and scheduling,
77.3% said they also used it as a mobile phone,
9.1% said it was being used for digital dictation,
4.6% said billing and 22.7% cited accessing
'other applications'.
This topic was also discussed at the lunch
hosted by the Insider and Avanquest earlier
this month (November 2007) where the point
was made that the ability of the latest versions
of document management systems to integrate
with Blackberry and effectively handle the
filing of email messages had significantly
boosted the status of the Blackberry from
handy to critical. This view was echoed in
the survey, which found that 66.7% of firms
agreed that the Blackberry Enterprise Server
(BES) must be considered a critical application
for business continuity and disaster recovery
purposes.
When asked how long a firm could function
effectively without access to a BES, 27.3%
said it would become critical after between
30 minutes and two hours; 22.7% said between
two and four hours, and 41% said between eight
and 24 hours. But there were also 9% who said
a BES crash would have no impact on them.
Given this apparent importance, it is surprising
that only 50% of respondents said their Blackberry
infrastructure was part of their firms' current
DR and business continuity strategies. There
again, the BES does seem robust, with 50%
of respondents saying they had suffered no
server failures over the past 12 months, and
45.5% saying they had only lost user connectivity
on between one and five occasions.
We also asked about the size of Blackberry
installations at law firms, with 32% of respondents
saying they had between 200 and 500 Blackberrys,
4.6% had between 500 and 1000 Blackberry devices,
and 9.1% had 1000 plus. There again 22.7%
had between 50 and 200 and 31% had less than
50. In terms of Blackberry Enterprise Servers,
68.2% had just one BES server, 18.2% had between
2 and 5, and 13.6% had more than 5 servers.
Finally we asked who got the Blackberrys in
your firms. The most popular answer (45.5%)
was all partners & fee earners who ask
and only 9.1% said all partners & fee
earners. However 18.2% said support &
support staff would receive Blackberrys and
22.7% said "anyone who asks". But
we did also have 4.6% of respondents who said
only partners got them.
The debate over lunch also revealed the interesting
fact that while many firms had a notional
policy of optional Blackberrys (in otherwords
you could have one if you wanted one) fee
earners and trainees who did not ask for a
Blackberry, subsequently did so because they
felt it was viewed as demonstrating a lack
of commitment to the firm and so constitute
a black mark against their name when it came
to their next appraisal/review. The view at
lunch was that the cultural issues surrounding
the use of Blackberrys had not been properly
addressed, with both clients and lawyers falling
into the trap of feeling that because it was
always-on 24/7 technology, they ought to respond
to incoming messages on a 24/7 basis. Another
comment was the fact that along with taking
their Blackberrys on holiday, it was also
now common to see people checking their Blackberrys
during meetings and conferences when they
should have been concentrating on other matters.
Two other points to come out of the lunch
were that: while billing was a popular application
to run on the Blackberry, it was probably
fairer to say it was the reporting side of
these systems (how much WIP relates to this
client, how much have we billed them in the
past, how much do they owe us etc) rather
than mobile time recording, that was the most
widely used feature. And, it was also suggested
that the reason for the relatively poor take-up
of Windows Mobile etc devices was that most
lawyers do not have a need to create or edit
Word or any other Microsoft Office documents
on a PDA - not least because of the pokey
screens - and so where happy to stick with
their almost idiot-proof Blackberrys. As one
IT director pointed out: as long as they receive
the message and know the document is available
(and which they can at least now read on a
Blackberry) they don't need all the functionality
(and complexity) of Windows Mobile.
All
about VoIP
(Jul 2007)
Over the past couple of months we have been
asking what your plans are - if any - for
embracing VoIP and IP telephony. technology.
Among law firms, 42% of those responding said
they already had some form of VoIP/IP infrastructure
in place and 56% said they were planning to
implement it, which leaves just 2% who are
presumably happy still using dolls-eye switchboards.
As to the timing of any VoIP migration, the
position is not quite so clear cut, with 40%
saying it was planned over the next 12 months
and a further 20% committing over the next
couple of years. But the remaining 40% admitted
it was planned 'sometime/one day', which tends
to suggest it may be on many firms' wish-lists
but not in their budgets.
We
also asked those firms with VoIP whether they
would recommend their supplier to another
firm. This yielded a not exactly ringing endorsement
with 57% saying they would but 43% saying
they would not. This reflects the comment
we heard from one firm who said the VoIP market
was the latest IT prairie to provide a home
for cowboys. And, talking of VoIP service
providers, our survey also revealed that only
25% of suppliers had been in the market for
longer than 3 years and 50% had been involved
for less than 12 months. If it is any consolation,
one third of suppliers who currently do not
provide VoIP services are planning to introduce
them in the near future.
Escrow - what
is it good for? (Apr 2007)
We asked readers what they thought about escrow
agreements, this is what you said: Among law
firms, 69% said they had escrow agreements
in place with their software suppliers, while
31% did not. However of those firms with escrow
agreements, only 7.7% reckoned it covered
all their systems, while 92.3% made do with
just some coverage. When it came to buying
new software, 37.5% of firms described the
availability of escrow as 'moderately important'
(nobody felt it was very important) and 67.5%
of you said it was unimportant.
This
finding was echoed in the answers to the following
question, with only 25% of respondents saying
they'd be willing to pay an extra amount in
annual support charges for an escrow agreement.
We also asked if readers understood the difference
between source code and a software application
- and 100% of respondents said they did. There
again the Insider does have a specialist readership,
as witnessed by the fact 68% said they had
people in their organisations with the skills
to work on source code.
There were also some questions specifically
for suppliers: We asked if suppliers offered
escrow - 40% said they offered it to everyone,
40% said they only offered it to those who
asked and 20% said they never offered escrow.
None of the suppliers said they offered escrow
as a chargeable extra. We also asked how frequently
the issue of escrow arose in sales negotiations
- 40% said sometimes, 60% said rarely. No
suppliers ticked the other options of 'all
the time' and 'never' however 20% did say
they had been in situations where the availability
of escrow had been crucial to winning an order.
Finally, the NCC came out as the most widely
used organisation with which to lodge source
code, used by 75% of suppliers responding
to the survey.
The
Legal IT Factor (Mar 2007)
With wall-to-wall reality TV on the box, we
thought we'd organise our own homage to the
genre, the snappily titled I'm a Legal Technology
Celebrity, get me out of the Big Brother House
because I have the IT Factor and provide readers
with an opportunity to vote for their favourite
legal technology celebrity - with a selection
of 10 to pick from. It turned out to be our
most popular poll ever.
When the votes were counted, in reverse order,
the wooden spoon award is shared by Liam Flanagan
of Tikit and Rob Lancashire of nFlow who both
polled 4% of the votes. Julie Berry of RPC,
Ann Elia of Travers Smith, PR maestro Sally
Bellwood and Jeremy Hill of the Legal Tech
Awards all scored in the 5-to-7% range. Nathan
Hayes of Osborne Clarke - now rated the sharpest
dressed man in legal IT - came in third place
with 10% of the vote. In joint second place
- each scoring 18% of the total votes - are
Jan Durant of Lewis Silkin and Ann Hemming
of LexisNexis Butterworths. And the winner,
with 28% of the vote, is the original godfather
of the legal IT sales world: Harry Townsend
of Thomson Elite.
IT budgets in 2007 (Jan
2007)
Last month we asked law firms whether their
IT budgets for the coming year would be going
up, coming down or remaining the same. The
poll, which generated one of the biggest turnouts
of the year, produced one very clear answer
– namely nearly 69% of respondents said
their budgets would be increasing. The bad
news is 37.5% said they would only be increasing
marginally. The good news is 31.3% of you
said your budgets would be increasing ‘significantly’.
As for the remainder... 22.9% said their budgets
would be staying the same and just 8.3% said
they would be decreasing. Compared with previous
years, the proportion of firms facing a decrease
is lower than usual, whereas on the increase
side, one interpretation of a ‘marginal’
increase is that it means budgets are frozen
but with an allowance for inflation. That
still leaves nearly a third of firms with
a significantly increased budget to spend.
When we polled the subject last year, about
58% of firms said their spending priority
was infrastructure, with email security and
business continuity taking priority. And 42%
said their focus would be new or upgrades
to existing software applications. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Buzzword
bingo (Dec 2006)
Last month we asked readers whether you had
heard of some of the latest IT buzzwords doing
the rounds – and if you understood what
the jargon meant. Podcasting was the most
popular with a 100% recognition rate and 83%
claiming to understand it. Next was KPI (key
performance indicators) which 73% had heard
of – and of these 67% felt they understood.
Matter centricity scored 70% but only 57%
of these said they understood it. Then came
virtualisation, which 27% of you had never
heard of – and only 50% of those who
had heard of it understood. In last place
was ERP (enterprise resource planning), which
33% had never heard of and 53% who had heard
of it, did not understand. Looks like the
marketing departments of some IT suppliers
need to go back to the drawing board. For
our next poll we are asking law firms whether
their IT budgets for 2007 are going up, down
or staying the same. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How
big is your email in-box (Nov 2006)
Last time we asked whether you were a hoarder
or a deleter when it came to managing the
number of email messages in your in-box.
When asked how quickly you deal with a new
message, 64% of you said you try to read,
answer and file or delete it as soon as possible,
4% said within an hour, 14% said by the end
of the working day, 4% said by the end of
the week, and 14% said they hoped to do it
someday soon. Next, we asked how many unread
emails would typically still be found in your
in-box at the end of the working day. This
time 64% (we suspect the same 64%) said the
box would be empty, 28% said between 1-to-10
messages, and 7% said there would be more
than 50 unread messages.
When however it came to messages that had
been read, then the results suggest there
are far more hoarders than deleters in the
legal IT world. A mere 7% said there would
be zero messages left in the in-box, 21% said
on average between 1 and 25 messages, 29%
said more than 25 but less than 100, leaving
43% with more than 100 read messages left
in the in-box. Before you get too complacent
we need to look at those with more than 100+
messages in a little more detail. Looking
at the survey results as a whole, 21% admitted
to having more than 1000 messages in their
in-box and 4% confessed to having more than
5000!
This month our focus is on buzzword bingo
– have you even heard of some of the
jargon now widely being used (matter centricity,
virtualisation etc) never mind whether you
understand what it means? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What
we did on our holidays (Oct 2006)
This summer we asked readers what they did
during the holiday season. We’re glad
to report that over 74% of readers participating
in the survey said taking time off for a vacation
to relax and pursue leisure interests. And
we were highly impressed that 68% of you did
not take a laptop or Blackberry with you on
holiday, which is a far higher proportion
of refuseniks than we expected. That still
leaves 32% who spent the summer trying to
keep the sand out of their disk drives and
looking for wi-fi hotspots but there again
22% of you also spent some of the summer visiting
international conferences and exhibitions,
such as ILTA.
So what else did you do? Just over 43% said
they used the quiet summer period to catch-up
on IT housekeeping projects and upgrades;
48% said they planned their new projects and
initiatives for the coming 12 months; and
an admirable 62% said they spent time thinking
about the meaning of life and what their next
career move should be.
Following reports that one US attorney has
27,893 messages in his in-box, for our next
readers poll we are prying into the secrets
of your email. Are you a ‘hoarder’
who keeps everything or a ‘deleter’
who tries to file, reply-to or delete messages
as they come in. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Confused
by HIPs? (May 2006)
Last month we asked readers if they were confused
by the developments surrounding HIPs and who
should take the lead in educating the market?
The good news is 60% said they were up to
speed – but that still leaves 40% of
you wondering what is going on in the face
of the biggest change to residential conveyancing
for decades. 40% of you said the Law Society
should do more to educate the market, 30%
said the onus was on the government and 30%
said the software industry could do more.
In this month’s readers’ poll
we follow up on a recent report which found
that people working in IT now suffer one of
the highest levels of stress of any vocational
group. So do you find your job in IT stressful?
And which factors contribute to your stress
levels? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just
how important is end of lifing? (Apr 2006)
How important is software end-of-lifing these
days? We asked how long had you been running
your current desktop operating systems? 24%
said you’d been running your current
O/S for less than 12 months, 55% said between
2 & 3 years, and 21% said between 4 &
5 years. We also asked when you planned to
upgrade it? Here, 12% said they had just done
so, 27% expected to do so within the next
12 months, 23% said within the next 2-to-3
years, and 38% of you said you had no immediate
plans.
With developments in HIPs and e-conveyancing
systems being announced almost weekly, we
are asking firms with residential property
practices: have you any clue what is going
on? And, who do you think should be doing
more to educate the market – the Law
Society, the Government or the legal ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Which factors
influence you most? (Mar 2006)
For last month’s Insider online survey,
we asked which information sources did law
firms and inhouse legal departments rate most
highly when they were looking for new IT systems?
In joint first place (and streets ahead of
anything else) as ‘very important’
sources were feedback from other firms and
internet research & webinars. Rated as
‘moderately important’ were industry
reports & buyers guides, followed by consultant’s
recommendations and then vendor presentations
& roadshows. Finally, the sources most
people rated as ‘not important’
were exhibitions and conferences. Consultants
were runners up among the least important
sources and nobody described consultant’s
recommendations as ‘very important’.
Microsoft’s next version of Windows
– Vista – is now on the horizon,
while in June the company is ending support
for Windows 98 and ME. But just how important
is end-of-lifing these days? In this month’s
survey we ask: how long have you been running
your current desktop operating system and
when do you plan to upgrade it? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To
outsource or keep inhouse? (Feb 2006)
For last month’s Insider online survey,
we asked whether electronic disclosure/e-discovery
is a core function that should be kept inhouse
or outsourced to external litigation support
bureaux. Only 8% of you said you would keep
it totally inhouse, 46% said outsourcing was
the way to go and the remaining 46% said they
would opt for a combination of inhouse and
outsourced facilities. Interestingly nobody
said they would base their choice on whatever
was the cheapest option.
Despite the success of the recent Legal IT
event in London, we still keep hearing that
thanks to so much information now being available
on the internet, the days of the traditional
exhibition are over. So, this month we are
asking what sources of information do law
firms and inhouse legal departments rate the
most highly when they are looking for new
IT systems? Exhibitions? Consultants? Buyers
guides? Supplier presentations? The internet?
Word of mouth from other firms? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We
want Blackberrys (Dec 2005)
For last month’s poll, we asked readers
which technology they had found the most useful
over the past 12 months: digital dictation
or mobile email devices such as the Blackberry?
The results were the most clear-cut we have
to-date, with 60% opting for the Blackberry
and only 40% voting in favour of digital dictation.
Perhaps the gold rush days of the digital
dictation boom are coming to a close?
This month we ask what has priority in your
2006 IT budgets: Microsoft .NET, email &
online security or upgrades to/new legal software
applications. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Microsoft
rules OK? (Nov 2005)
Last month we asked the question: if Microsoft
were to move into the small business software
market and offer applications such as accounts,
CRM and document management suitable for law
firms, would you (a) still continue buying
specialist legal systems or (b) switch over
to Microsoft? The poll found that 45% of you
would immediately opt for Microsoft whereas
55% would stick with your current suppliers
– although whether this is out of loyalty
or a greater fear of Microsoft was not clear.
This month we are asking which technology
have you found the most useful over the past
12 months: digital dictation or mobile email
devices such as the Blackberry? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Which PDF?
(Oct 2005)
Through our new online survey facility, the
Insider has been running a readers poll for
the past month asking the question: which
version of Adobe Acrobat do you use to read
PDF files? We were interested, as we wanted
to ensure we made the PDF edition of the Insider
as accessible as possible and, when we asked
Adobe they didn’t know the answer, so
we decided to find out for ourselves. The
results are now in: 46% of you use Acrobat
version 6, 39% use the latest version 7, 15%
use version 5 and nobody uses version 4 anymore.
Thank you.
This month we ask... if Microsoft were to
move into the small business systems market
and offer applications such as accounts, CRM
and document management that were suitable
for law firms, would you (a) still continue
buying specialist legal systems or (b) switch
to the Microsoft products?
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