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Our top story this month is that UK top 100 law firm Osborne Clarke is building a sizeable software engineering teams, with IT head Nathan Hayes telling us that the firm is entering a “new chapter” for technology and that its buy strategy no longer meets requirements. The firm, which is in the process of rolling out Microsoft Office 365, is also running a proof of concept in which it is using Teams for matter management: one partner recently codified an entire matter in Teams Planner, as OC evaluates what its core collaboration tech should look like going forward: enterprise or legal tech?
You could argue that what OC is doing around Teams ought to be the headline. Around six months ago the London-headquartered firm formed a consulting group, which includes IT trainers, business analysts, project managers and legal tech managers who are lawyers, who together with the knowledge group are helping to develop matter plans and bake in best practice. To put it in perspective, many other firms are still at the stage of panicking about how to structure a Teams deployment in order to prevent it turning into the Wild West.
But the very visibly accelerated cultural acceptance of the public cloud means that we will be having these conversations more often.
On the subject of the public cloud – and yes, of course it’s another Microsoft story – June saw iManage adopt Azure as its global cloud platform and attain co-sell ready status. This demonstrates that iManage is not only a key customer but a significant Microsoft partner. It now has an app for Teams that will enable iManage users to search for documents within Teams.
Just throwing this out there: is Microsoft’s news in June that it will end of life Windows 10 – supposedly its last ever operating system – a warning about having all your eggs in one basket? I’ll leave that one hanging for now but take a look in the June Orange Rag for more.
In our latest new tech alert and second exclusive of this June issue, leading Canadian law firm BCF has gone live on brand new automated accounts payables solution XPENS.AI, which is officially launching today (23 June).
XPENS.AI, which integrates with TR Elite 3E and Aderant, starts with optical character recognition (OCR) scanning of invoices, but then takes things a step further by interacting with the firm’s database and looking at historical allocation. We speak to the founders and serial investor Dan Wales, who says it’s the last piece of the puzzle in his investment portfolio.
And last but not least, thank you to Justin Edwards, founder and director of ITS Recruitment, for this month’s in depth ‘view from the recruitment market’, in which he shares the biggest trends and shifts in legal IT hiring. Interestingly, Edwards says that the “Great Resignation” that was being predicted by some print news media (due to disaffected staff feeling put upon during lockdown or people re-evaluating their lives and changing career) has not materialised thus far.
As always we want to hear from you – if you’ve got any news, serious or light hearted (goodness knows we all need a bit of a laugh!) email me on [email protected]
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