Asia Pacific Legal Technology Insider

Legal Technology Insider’s new newsletter dedicated to the Asia Pacific legal IT market is now out. Although they have covered APAC news on the famous Orange Rag blog and in the regular newsletters for many years, an edition specifically for the APAC region is now live.

Why now? Because there is just so much happening in the APAC market, both in terms of the legal technology industry and the surrounding legal business environment. As the editor Charles Christian writes in the first of his Christian Uncut columns (see page 3 of the publication - link below) "we are living in interesting times - far from being on the fringes of the legal world, what happens in the APAC region is now starting to shape the future of the North American and UK/European legal markets".

For the record, the definition of Asia Pacific for this publication includes not only Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong but also Japan, China/PRC and India.

The first edition can be found here.

Keep Up With Janders Dean

Although we've been somewhat quiet in the past few months - and we've neglected the blog slightly (like the Janders Dean HQ garden in fact), you can keep an eye on our activities over on Twitter at @jandersdean.

Janders Dean - New South African Client

Janders Dean has expanded the client base and the geographic reach of the company in recent months, with the addition of one of South Africa's leading law firms to the Janders Dean family.

With clients such as King & Wood Mallesons, Ashurst (formerly Blake Dawson), Reed Smith, Gilbert+Tobin, Norton Rose, Clyde & Co, Freehills, Middletons, Vodafone, BAE Systems, Willmott Dixon, Sparke Helmore, Stewarts Law, and many others placing their trust in our experience and expertise, Janders Dean continues to set the bar as one of the leaders in independent legal technology and strategic knowledge management consulting.

We look forward to growing our client base further in 2012, and serving our existing clients with the professionalism and pragmatism they have come to expect.

Janders Dean Snares Professor Richard Susskind OBE - 5th Annual Legal Knowledge & Innovation Conference

After the phenomenal success of the 2011 event, which saw global knowledge and innovation thought leaders such as Chris Freeland of Baker & McKenzie, Tom Baldwin of Reed Smith LLP, Derek Schueren of Recommind, and Peter Williams of Deloitte Digital share their vision with over 130 senior delegates, Janders Dean have announced that they will again be gathering an unrivalled faculty of speakers to their 5th Annual Janders Dean Knowledge & Innovation conference.

In what will be one of his only open speaking engagements to the APAC market this year, international thought leader and legal innovation expert Professor Richard Susskind OBE has agreed to provide the keynote address at the conference.

Additional speakers involved in the conference faculty will include global management and partner representatives from Allen & Overy, Norton Rose, Freehills, Clayton Utz, Gilbert+Tobin, Vodafone, King & Wood Mallesons, and many other leading firms.

Combining exceptional international and domestic speakers, fresh and relevant content, and unrivalled peer-to-peer networking, the annual Janders Dean conference has led the market in APAC region for a number of years. It is widely considered by management and practitioners in the knowledge management, information technology and innovation, risk management, business development, and senior leadership roles, to be the only "go-to" law firm and in-house legal event in Australia.

The event also attracts international management attendees from leading suppliers in the UK and US. Organisations such as Autonomy, Microsoft, Phoenix Business Solutions, Lexis Nexis, Recommind, HighQ Solutions, DocsCorp, Headshift, OpenText, Endeca, and many others have attended the conference to hear the challenges faced by firms in the region, and to make themselves available for face to face time to delegates.

The 5th Annual Janders Dean Knowledge & Innovation conference will be held in Sydney on September 20th this year.

Each of the annual Janders Dean APAC events has reached capacity well in advance of the scheduled date, with 2012 looking to again be a sold out event. For further information on delegate bookings or sponsorship opportunities, please contact Justin North (justin.north@jandersdean.com).

(Better) Matter Management Migrates to Australia

We've been taking a little look at the shifting market in Matter Management in Australia while in town, and it appears that FWBS's MatterCentre solution has gained more and more attention in the past three months with new clients such as Slater & Gordon, McCabe Terrill and Moray & Agnew jumping on to the new arrival.

While the other legacy vendors such as such as Caseflow and Visualfiles appear to be asleep on a beach somewhere, FWBS seem to be becoming the system of choice for firms looking to move away from older case management and document assembly systems.

The most powerful message to date which would indicate their chances of future market domination in APAC (apart from the amazing Silverlight based navigation and the very cool iPad/iPhone integration within the product) is the fact that FWBS have planted resources directly in the region to sell and support.

We're predicting big things in APAC for enhanced matter management, and we expect that some of the older and less flexible case management vendors will start to hurt as they leave the region in the hands of resellers who have either fallen asleep counting their recurring maintenance revenues, are powerless to dictate the direction of the actual product, and/or who very rarely understand the market they are actually selling to.

Linklaters Purchases Autonomy

News here from Autonomy of their recent legal win with global giant Linklaters. The firm will be using the powerful search tool across their Knowledge repositories using the new user-orientated enterprise search platform powered by IDOL. Great win for the Autonomy gang, and validation that search is indeed still relevant and on the radar for Knowledge systems.

HighQ Solutions Moving & Shaking

News from HighQ HQ that they are on the move. The team have moved closer to our new favourite roof top venue (Mint Hotel's Sky Lounge) to Great Tower Street. All indications of even more exciting news and technology leadership from the group after an excellent Sunday brunch with Director Stuart Barr at Dishoom. If you have not already, make sure you follow their movements on Twitter @highqsolutions.

Phoenix Business Solutions & DTE Event

Phoenix Business Solutions will be holding a DTE event on June 1st in London at The Savoy. Full details of the event here. This is well worth attending, particularly based on their recent win with Olswang (see here). The team also had a very successful private round table in Sydney recently with some of the Janders Dean friends and family large law CFOs. Expect more soon.

UK Law Firms - Knowledge Management & IT Recruitment

An interesting two months of change in the UK law firm support department leadership areas - particularly in Knowledge Management and Information Technology.

Innovator Sam Diamond of Clifford Chance fame will be leaving to join Norton Rose as the Global Knowledge Management Director, and will also have a new peer as the firm also announces a new global CIO. Sheila Doyle joins in the role, and has previously held IT roles at BP, IBM and, most recently, Royal Mail, which she left last year to work on a freelance basis. Full details here.

In other moves, Chris White of Ashurst fame has emerged as the new interim CIO at Kennedys, with former Kennedys CIO Ian Lawreys moving to Barlow Lyde & Gilbert. Tim Hyman (previously IT Director at Taylor Wessing) has moved to Reed Smith to become IT Director EMEA of the global firm, while upcoming appointments in the Knowledge Management field should also be expected from firms Stephenson Harwood and Osbourne Clark.

Janders Dean congratulates all the movers and shakers on their exciting new challenges.

More UK Firms Chase Great Australian Dream

After a whirl wind two years of arrivals, mergers, and scouting trips, yet another major UK firm is seeking a presence in Australia. After the arrival (via various methods) of Allen & Overy, Norton Rose, DLA Piper, and Clifford Chance, news has leeked this morning in London from The Lawyer regarding Herbert Smith's plans to arrive in the land of uranium, coal and beer coolers. Full story here.

Autonomy Buys Iron Mountain

Autonomy have announced details of their approach to purchase part of the digital division of Iron Mountain.

"We are pleased to announce this transaction, one we have been looking at for some time, which will bring significant advancements for customers," commented Dr. Mike Lynch, Group CEO of Autonomy. "Processing customer data in the cloud continues to be a strategic part of Autonomy's information governance business. We look forward to extending regulatory compliance, legal discovery and analytics to a host of new customers as well as enabling the intelligent collection and processing of non-regulatory data from distributed servers, PCs and especially tens of millions of mobile devices. This will afford the opportunity to bring to these customers the power of IDOL's meaning-based technology."

Excellent summary of the purchase details here at The Orange Rag here.

...so they did merge with Mallesons afterall...(sort of)

Clifford Chance target Cochrane Lishman Carson Luscombe appears to be a 2006 spin off from Mallesons Stephen Jaques (Ian Cochrane and Michael Lishman).

Legal Leaders profile of the two founding partners appears here from Lawyers Weekly in December 2010.

...and true to Australian form, there is even a beer connection. Cochrane wears another corporate hat - as the chairman of Little World Beverages Limited, which brews Janders Dean's most beloved Little Creatures beer in Fremantle.

Australia - Who Gets Left Behind?

A detailed article about the newest kid on the block in Australia (as of only a few hours ago) - Clifford Chance. The firm joins Allen & Overy, Norton Rose, DLA and Bakers as the latest global giant to arrive, with the first three in that list arriving formally (and almost on the same flight) less than six months ago.

This is not a gradual arrival - this is clearly an invasion. So who will get left behind? Will the industry look to the likes of other UK leaders such as Freshfields and Herbert Smith and consider them the slow movers for not joining the vegemite varsity?

Perhaps the US mid-sized firms will be seen as the group that lost out the most by leaving their run too late?

Or will history actually look less favourably on the domestic firms in Australia that have not yet benefited from an international marriage, saying they were too slow to move, too slow to change, or indeed just too slow to react to the increasing threat? If so, the next logical question is "why so slow"?

Most domestic market dominance and evolution analysis (particularly that which focuses on comparatively small domestic markets and their relationships with larger global threats - irrespective of industry or offering) points to the long term winners of market share being the global brands and the mid to small sized domestic brands and boutiques, with the hardest hurt in the long term being the previously strongest domestic leaders (most often mistakenly seen as irreplaceable and immovable brands).

Many business leaders and academics have studied such trends, with multiple authors hypothesising on the causes - leadership, change resistance, and blindness brought on by ignorance and apathy can't be discounted.

To all those "she'll be right mate" types who may look to stick their heads in the sand and continue to say that this won't change the face of legal service provision in Australia or the competitive landscape that has existed for over 20 years, we remind you that although Rome wasn't built in a day, it fell faster than a tropical Queensland cyclone.

Clifford Chance Arrive in Australia

As predicted last week - Clifford Chance announced today that they will open in Australia. Full press release from the firm here.

Far from the expected take over of a domestic giant, the firm has decided to today announced mergers with Australia's two leading boutique law firms, Chang, Pistilli & Simmons (CP&S) in Sydney and Cochrane Lishman Carson Luscombe (CLCL) in Perth. The firm says that "the mergers are among the first steps in the delivery of an ambitious growth strategy for Asia, with plans to double regional revenues for the Firm through investment in new offices, talent and practices".

This gives the firm an immediate 14 partner presence - much like A&O's initial presence (which now has them with more - filling four floors of office space after their initial start up needed just the one floor).

Watch for selected marquee partners from leading firms leaving to join up one at time.

2020 - How Many Large Australian Firms Will Survive?

Nice article from Lawyers Weekly on the challenges facing the large Australian firms published this week (see here). Even more fuel on the fire comes from ALB Magazine with their analysis of the "Hottest Australian Firms to Watch in 2011" (here). Two of the top three in the "watch list" being Allen & Overy and...wait for it...Clifford Chance. We predict that a repeat of Allen & Overy's successful entrance model (the wholesale partner raid) will be seen soon in 2011. Change is inevitable in a market where "we'll be alright mate" won't cut it for too much longer - watch this space for the inevitable rise of the "Global Panel" approach from in-house legal.

Janders Dean "Food for Thought" Breakfast Briefing - February 17th 2011

Janders Dean will be hosting the first in a series of exclusive "Food for Thought" breakfast briefings next Thursday (17th February 2011) in Sydney, Australia. Hosted in partnership with BTP Australia and Lawyers Weekly Magazine, this briefing will focus on the evolving area of legal process enhancement.

An expert panel of Michael Boot (CEO of Gilbert+Tobin), Gerard Neiditsch (CIO of Mallesons) and Janet Young (COO of Freehills) will be providing their thoughts to over 40 invited law firm leaders.

Stand by for the next in the exclusive "Food for Thought" series from Janders Dean in May 2011, and our leading Knowledge Management Conference in September 2011.

FWBS Live Webinar Event

FWBS (one of the UK's leading suppliers of Case Management and Matter Management solutions to the legal sector) will be hosting a live webinar next Tuesday (15th February) at 10:30am GMT. The event is aimed at providing an introduction to FWBS MatterCentre and will demonstrate how the company's software solutions overcome critical law firm management issues.

Full details on the event here. Further details on FWBS and MatterCentre are worth looking at here.

Phoenix Business Solutions - Office 2010 Deployment Seminar (Law Firms)

London based law firm friends of Janders Dean should take a look at the following event hosted by the gang over at Phoenix Business Solutions. The event will be held on 17th February at the The Tower Hotel, St. Katherine’s Way, London from 3:30pm to 6pm.

Full details of the event here.

Sparke Helmore iManage Project News

An excellent summary article from IDM Magazine on the leading Autonomy iManage implementation project at Janders Dean client firm Sparke Helmore (a project which has a unique and award winning approach to Knowledge Management specific features of the Autonomy suite). Full article here.

New Chairman for CPA Global

After the recent announcement from outsource provider Integreon regarding their appointment of Richard Susskind to their advisory board, CPA Global have announced today that David Harrel (previously senior partner of London firm SJ Berwin) will succeed Geoffrey Grime as chairman. Full press release here.