Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31October 2016 LocalGovernmentLawyer 24 The key thing that really jumps out when we look at the survey results (see p4) is the overwhelming percentage of local authority lawyers that are expecting an increase, or at least no fall, in the number of legal disputes in the foreseeable future. Increasing numbers of legal disputes, combined with need to make savings wherever possible and inevitable requirement to make cut backs to staff numbers and resources, is leaving in- house teams with little option but to outsource to external counsel. But is this a false economy? As we discussed at the roundtable see (p12), the cost of external counsel is hardly competitive compared to using the in- house team. Often client departments are stuck between a rock and a hard place where those with the greatest experience in specific areas have left due to retirement or redundancy – do they instruct the in house legal team who have a broad range of expertise or do they instruct an external expert in the field at a greater cost? There is also a fear that perceptions are growing of legal involvement being expensive and to be avoided; meaning that clients don’t come to legal soon enough and there ends up being more work overall – and therefore more hours being charged and more money being spent due to having to fix the bad proceedings beforehand. So how can technology help? Won’t it just ‘get in the way’? Will it really work for teams like ours? When we think of legal technology there are all of the fashionable buzzwords like AI (artificial intelligence), digital transformation, and ODR (online dispute resolution). But how do these work out in real life, day-to-day working within legal teams? The fact is that currently these buzzword technologies are not developed for real world working or are far too expensive to be accessible to anyone other than their creators or big budget private firms. Yet there are lots of great technologies out there that really are not being used to their greatest potential. We have long discussed the fact that local authorities are not sharing enough information about which technologies and systems are working well, which are not, what they would like to see more of or different ways of doing things. For case management we are seeing clients using their systems at court, on laptops and it is working well - it is more a case of creating a culture where this is considered to be the norm. Shared and traded services are areas that councils are being asked to focus on, improving the way they are working by making the most of the expertise at other local authorities whilst also being able to generate income for their own council. Sounds ideal but in practice the range of ICT systems being used and the Poppy Watson-Brooks explains how moving the use of tech out of the theoretical and into the real world could benefit local authority legal teams. Sweating the assets