How well informed is your firm, asks Tim Heywood
The legal profession rightly prides itself on its deep technical expertise and the sound professional judgment it can bring to the variety of business challenges faced by clients.
It also applies tried and tested ways of handling information, be that sensitive commercial information supplied by a client (perhaps the details of a proposed merger or acquisition, or a new consumer product) or its own information (the information derived from that deep technical expertise) such as know-how; templates and other specialist materials.
Information (or rather the value that can be derived from the conscious process of managing, protecting and exploiting information) lies at the very heart of successful legal practice. That much is surely a “given”.
Information is a valuable asset to the firm and so, naturally, all firms manage and control their information effectively at all times and extract maximum commercial value from it.
Because lawyers are also bound by a professional duty of confidence, and that duty is inculcated into us during the training process and is well understood by each individual lawyer in
