Peer to Peer Magazine

PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGA ZINE OF ILTA 24 THE TRANSFORMATIVE ROLE OF IT While IT advances are expected to permeate and transform every aspect of law firm activity in the decade ahead (and beyond), research highlights four core themes emerge: Excerpted from ILTA's Legal Technology Future Horizons Report THE CLIENT IS THE PRIORITY We must focus IT investments on securing and enhancing customer relationships. Strategic priorities must include quality of insight and advice, speed, responsiveness, flexibility, enhancing the capability and efficiency of professional staff and the capacity for innovation. Operationally, client demand is expected to focus on clarity of progress and budget reporting, providing real-time visibility of legal workflow, improving collaboration, integrating with client systems and building intelligence into systems to add insight and value and reduce the level of human involvement required. LEVERAGE LAWYERS We must enhance the productivity, strategic insight and impact of lawyers. At the most basic level, they need to perform from anywhere at any time on a range of personal devices that could emerge over time. Next, we must build intelligence into lawyer support to anticipate and provide the content they need when they need it — from analyzing critical information to presenting in court. Artificial Intelligence will play a major role in learning how lawyers work, personalizing the support and gradually automating many tasks historically performed by professionals. RE-ENGINEER PROCESSES We must take a process- and project-management approach to all work undertaken. Workflows must be streamlined, broken down into discrete tasks to be allocated to the lowest cost resource that can complete them — a lawyer, outsourced service partner or intelligent system. This will accelerate the commoditization of many tasks and could reshape the legal value chain as more low-value tasks are parceled out to external providers. This in turn will drive the firm to focus on developing new value- adding services. INNOVATE TO DIFFERENTIATE As a greater scope and volume of work is automated and the price gets driven down, firms must focus on using IT to generate and support client-focused innovation. This could be the development of new products and services, taking on activities traditionally performed in-house by the client and moving up the value chain into areas such as new product development. For example, as clients enter new markets with technology solutions like driverless cars, these will be highly disruptive and will require new thinking in areas such as risk and liability. Increasingly intelligent products might even have laws embedded; for example, cars could fine us for exceeding the speed limit. Law firms will need to use IT to help develop early warning systems that alert them to the emergence of such new ideas. Leaders will seek to gain a "first-mover advantage" by approaching the innovators and becoming involved from the product design stage. LEGAL TECHNOLOGY FUTURE HORIZONS LEADER'S DIGEST Leader's Digest Now Available! Download your copy at www.iltanet.org/LTFH

• Cover