Paper, pixel and process

An estimated 2,000,000 letters are sent and received each workday by the British legal profession, costing about £190m in postage alone per year. Even excluding practice in corporate law, electronic communication accounts for slightly over half of solicitors' correspondence. However, as discussed in my previous article, there are everyday concerns about reliability, confidentiality and legal admissibility of the most convenient, general purpose written communication system we use: email.

Figure 1 shows very broadly how several different communication options are perceived by the profession, on criteria of having low risk (meaning they are reliable and confidential), and cost-effectiveness/efficiency (meaning they are quick and cheap to use). There is clearly a gap in the market - in the desirable top right quadrant.

The vision

The UK legal profession has a tremendous diversity of written communication requirements - from sole practitioners in Pitlochry to the "magic circle", from criminal advocates to public law specialists. Despite the frequent need to communicate across these practice areas and geographic locations, the thrust of innovation in the market at the moment is towards a plethora of single-purpose solutions, rather than a platform technology.

A platform can be likened to Microsoft Windows - by itself it does nothing much, but it acts as an enabler to allow users to do a great number of different things. A platform allows different organisations to develop their own tailor-made solutions on top of it, to service their own niches, but at much lower cost and with greater opportunities for integration than if each provider heads off in their own direction.

The core requirements for developing this platform for the legal profession include the following:

• it should be transactional (like letters or emails, rather than instant messaging);
• it must be very convenient to use, both on a day-to-day basis and to deploy;
• it must be very flexible;
• it must be widely available at low cost, to both large and small organisations;
• strong encryption in transit is essential;
• the origin of a message needs to be reliably known;
• tracking message delivery is extremely desirable;
• sent and received messages need to be auditable and easily archived;
• the commercial model needs to feel "fair" and "open".

This is obviously no easy task, considering this list of requirements, but it is achievable, as Wiremail is setting out to prove.

Towards liftoff

Some argue that if the profession really wanted new communication technology, the free market would provide it. However, economists use the "network effect", aka "critical mass", to explain why the market alone struggles to adopt new communication technology. In conventional economics, how much other people consume of something doesn't have a direct impact on how much use you get out of your own consumption - think shredding or employing associates. But communications networks are quite different: their usefulness increases with the number of other users. When there are few other users of it, there is little benefit in being part of a communications network, so there is a vicious circle preventing such services reaching critical mass.

What can happen is that some organisations are able to dictate, heavily subsidise or invest in the use of certain systems which meet (only) their individual needs, rather than those of a range of different niches. A good example is Registers, with their online ARTL system - although designed with the users in mind, it is a single-purpose portal. In the absence of Law Society of Scotland co-ordination, we must expect the proliferation of incompatible, expensive and bespoke web filing systems to continue, developed to fulfil the needs of their builders rather than for the profession as a whole.

The problem is that an open and general purpose service that could provide enormous economic benefits to the legal profession - reduced costs, increased speed, increased efficiency - struggles to start without the influence of a body interested in the long-term welfare of the users.

It is worth considering what impact ABS and the new regulation will have on legal communication. My own opinion is that it will lead to rapid quasi-automation of a great number of routine legal tasks, and that inter-organisation electronic communication between sides will become a powerful enabling tool for this. It's hard to imagine Tesco Law plc, if it were to come about, not doing everything it can to communicate efficiently, and businesses expecting to adapt to a new environment would do well to look at whether they too can increase the efficiency of their routine processes, and to try to communicate as efficiently and rapidly as possible.

The quantitative and qualitative research I conducted with the help of both British Law Societies revealed (some would say, confirmed), that there is a measurable and definite desire to make more use of electronic communication in the profession. If Scotland is to be "at the forefront of change" and to "continue to innovate to deliver high-quality services efficiently (and profitably), utilising technology to do so where appropriate", as the President wrote recently (Journal, September, 7), I would argue that setting standards and assisting the adoption of an advanced, general purpose communication platform is both a necessary and natural role for the Law Society of Scotland.