What is dot NET? - Solicitor's Journal
1st December 2004
Solicitors Journal Artice,p. New Technology, do lawyers really need it?
For example what is .NET? what's the benefit?
While the new technologies of the Spinning Jenny and the Steam Engine had a profound effect on the lives of the people living in those days, they were nothing like the effect we’ve experienced due to changes in computing and electronics in general since the early 1970’s.
When you consider how long it took man to invent the wheel and all other things we now take for granted, isn’t it amazing just how quickly we’ve moved from 4MB computer disc drives that were the size and weight of washing machines, to 512MB flash memory sticks the size of a small cigarette lighter.
Looking back over the past twenty years, its hard to imagine just what the next twenty will bring, indeed it’s sometimes difficult to look just a few years hence. However that’s exactly what we have to do otherwise like the man on the penny-farthing, we’ll get left behind.
Linetime, like many similar organisations, has had a special team in place for some time now whose job it is to look forward and try and calculate exactly where the IT market in general is going and more particularly where the Legal Software market will be in the foreseeable future.
One of the more general findings of this group, known fondly as the Star Gazers, is the fact that the most significant changes to have occurred over the past few years relate not so much to the functionality of the software lawyers use in their day to day business, but more to how they communicate with it, with one another and with their clients.
From the introduction of modern mobile phones, the Internet and wireless keyboards, to the integration of hand held computers and the total wireless office, the way fee earners actually interface with colleagues and clients, in short, how they send and receive data, is the most significant change for many a legal practice.
Now while all business has its own jargon, the IT business seems to have more. One of the latest you may have come across is the term ‘smart client’.
While we all have a few ‘smart clients’ what we actually mean is an electronic device with some level of ‘intelligence’ (i.e. a microprocessor) that can link to and ‘feed from’ a master computer or ‘host’ thereby enabling the free flow of data to and fro.
The potential to integrate such ‘smart clients’ or in other words different types of electronic hardware, whether mobile phones, PDAs, lap tops or simple PCs into one cohesive whole, has been something of a ‘Holy Grail’ for the IT industry for some time. However this is exactly what the latest communications technology from Microsoft known as ‘dot NET’ (.NET) enables you to do.
The key benefit of .NET is the fact that this integration takes place via the Internet, so the location of your ‘smart client’ is totally irrelevant. It could be in the next office or in the West of Ireland; it could be in a court in Birmingham, or in a client’s house in Aberdeen.
This new .NET technology allows you the lawyer to develop what is in essence a virtual office. No longer do fee earners have to come back into the office to process their paperwork or synchronise diaries with colleagues. Modern systems now provide fee earners with the ability to work from home without losing any of the technology benefits that office based staff enjoy. Microsoft® .NET based systems allow for anywhere, anytime, access to information and web services.
As the company itself describe it, Microsoft® .NET is a set of software technologies for connecting information, people, systems, and devices. This new generation of technology is based on Web services—small building-block applications that can connect to each other as well as to other, larger applications over the Internet.
Because this new technology was developed and rolled out by arguably the world’s most influential software company, many other organisations are following suit with the result that there is a growing set of ancillary .NET Web services being developed - from such things as security authentication to calendaring - that can be combined with other Web services or used directly with ‘smart client’ applications.
One such is the Microsoft MapPoint® Web Service that allows you to quickly and easily integrate high-quality maps, driving directions, and other location intelligence into your applications, business processes, and websites.
Data security and client privacy are a central part of creating and delivering practical solutions for remote working. Therefore distributing computing power across numerous systems - both inside and outside the walls of your office - creates new types of challenges for a supplier such as Linetime.
Clients and third parties alike want to be assured that their data will remain private and secure when they are conducting business or simply exchanging information over the Internet. The new ‘distributed model’ of computing, with its new levels of integration between clients, servers, and Web services, demands that a high degree of security is woven into the very fabric of the whole system. As you would expect, leading-edge security features are a highlight of Microsoft® .NET technologies.
The great attraction of the .NET technologies to companies like Linetime, is the flexibility it provides in the building of heterogeneous customer systems, by enabling us to connect an infinite variety of personal devices into the one virtual and secure solution.
The result of this new technology is that individual fee earners can enjoy much more freedom of movement both metaphorically and literally. Legal practices can now look forward like our Star Gazers and plan for a future that is not restricted by copper wire or fibre optics. Nor does the number of fee earners you have or the physical number of office locations restrict you either.
Once again technology is opening up another ‘brave new world’, just as the Iron Horse did across the plains of America and Jenny did when she spun her first web in those dark satanic mills of Lancashire, in the early days of what we now know was the first, but not the last, Industrial Revolution.
Tony Klejnow Managing Director
Linetime Limited
Moorfield House
Leeds
LS19 7YA
T: 0113 250 0020
E: info@linetime.co.uk