Like the cautious lawyers we were born to be, we are rather late to the party – there are a few blogs out there (!) – and perhaps we are privately (if you really press us) a bit embarrassed about this. After all, aren’t we precisely the guys and gals who are supposed to be showing the way, beating a path through the legal tech jungle with machetes, sternly demanding that others behind us keep up? Well yes, and so it has taken a lot of Trustee group therapy to get this far, and also Ruth (our esteemed Trust Secretary) and Laurence (our equally esteemed Editor) to remove every technical and other excuse for not doing this ….. until…. finally there was no longer any rational reason for saying “no”.
With impeccable sense of timing we launch this early in 2009 in a very sombre environment. Each day the world press communicates unwelcome fresh evidence of a deepening recession, and all we know is that we don’t know how deep this will be, or how long it will be, before indices turn positive again. We comfort ourselves with the thought that it could be worse, for as tech lawyers we are in a sector where recession might mean opportunity as well as threat.
In the world of outsourcing, the model for ITO or BPO aligns well with the extraordinary current pressure in our own and our clients’ businesses to save costs. In the world of regulation we don’t expect pressures to improve performance to soften anytime soon – data protection, privacy, and security requirements are all under close and fresh scrutiny, the unsurprising result of much too much missing data on stolen discs and laptops last year. Our clients therefore need new and repeated guidance and counsel. So the demand for our services shouldn’t fall off a cliff – some areas of our work will in fact expand.
And so the world’s wheels and our own will keep turning. Like a group of highly animated meerkats we will put our heads collectively and individually above the parapet this year, and share our insights, thoughts, and queries with you. Who knows we might even find one or two green shoots!
