I am a strong believer in the idea that businesses, and particularly technology businesses, need to make use of every medium which is available to get messages across to potential users. The new media formats such as Twitter, blogs, Facebook and video come at litigation support companies from two directions – they are simultaneously a medium for the distribution of information and a source of potentially discoverable information. Just as it becomes increasingly challenging to keep pace with the volumes to be collected, so it becomes harder to be heard as the means of instant worldwide publication become available to everybody.

That well-worn communications device, the press release, has many advantages. Companies can fine-tune the message, reduce it to the fewest possible words, and distribute it to a mailing list of recipients who will pass it on. Modern technology has multiplied the methods of distribution but the format remains the same as it did in the days when PRs were sent out in the post. The bigger the company, the more likely it is that there is a corporate style for press releases.

How refreshing then, to find Deborah Baron, VP Legal and Compliance for Autonomy, delivering short, snappy messages by means of an informal video interview. The interviewer was Ari Kaplan, whom I met for the first time at LegalTech, and it is one of a series of such interviews which he did there. The fact that these things are relatively informal and lack the gloss of high post-production polish, actually adds to their value particularly if, as here, the performance is brief and to the point.

The message in the video is consistent with the session which Deborah moderated the previous day – that cloud computing is top of the list this year, that information is not understanding, and that it is easy to lose the forest for the trees. This is a punchy way to deliver useful thoughts and it is good to see the likes of Autonomy being willing to use these less formal ways of getting messages across.

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