I don't know about you but when I word associate "innovation" the term "lawyer" is pretty low on my list. Much like where I'd put "Jeffrey Dahmer" on the "celebrity chef" list. So you'll understand my surprise when I recently met a law firm that is making the business of legal IT exciting.
One of the unique aspects of delivering IT services to a bunch of attorneys is that everyone's overpaid, cranky, and incredibly self-important. Attorneys bill astonishing sums in six-minute increments to dispense common knowledge and you can bet their clients don't want to wait while they get an OS patch or a password reset. This legal customer's CIO gets that in spades and turned the 
legal profession on its ear by thinking first about what gives the firm a competitive advantage.
I sat wide-eyed as my new friend Roland told me about an app they developed to automate the byzantine process of requesting research. Before, when an attorney needed to know why FRC102.1 in Maine wasn't ratified until 1953 it took a bunch of emails, time, and people to get an answer. Now, there's an app for that and it's so easy to use even an attorney can master it in five minutes. He went on to describe how they've automated their Windows 7 migration and how they have big plans to automate everything else. I was like a congregant in the pews at a Pentacostal revival, hanging on his every word. Reverend Roland, praise be thy name.
There's immense power in a clear vision combined with a simple platform. Roland described other simple apps they've built like requests for word processing or retrieval of archived client data. He's like a bloodhound - dude just goes around looking for inefficient processes and rallies his team when he finds them. The more Rolands I meet the more I'm inspired. Cloud is the new OS and Rolands everywhere are the new Steve Wozniak.
Last month we introduced the IPA (Index of PaaS Activity) in this space. It's a simple way to track the phenomenon that is Platform as a Service and it's calculated by weighting a combination of stock prices, job postings, news headlines, and social media activity. We kicked off with a score of 100. This month, it slumped 8.25% to 91.75. PaaS stocks were up 2.9% but all other activity declined. This rocket's got fuel, though. It seems our proclivity for discussing all things PaaS was temporarily distracted by family, shopping, and the Mayan Apocalypse.
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