The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/34686
The Law2020™ initiative is one year in, and although we’re beginning to see a clearer picture of what the legal industry might look like in 2020, there are still unanswered questions lying ahead of us. ILTA recently engaged in a “virtual roundtable” with four industry leaders to discuss their vision of the future of IT — an operations forecast. Each person’s interview can be heard in its entirety on the accompanying podcasts. Who will drive legal technology in 2020? Judi: I think the drivers will be the attorneys — especially younger ones — partly due to the consumerization of new systems and products like the iPad, which has really changed the way people work. And I think that’s only scratching the surface. Clive: Consumerization is exactly why I think it’ll be industry trends that drive technology in the legal sector. Traditionally, law firms have been good at exploiting technology, but not good at driving it. Marcus: Firm and client needs will continue to dictate what technologies are implemented; industry trends are a by-product of that. As firms look for solutions to problems, they’ll study what technologies are trending up or down and leverage those appropriately. But first and foremost, the office and road needs of attorneys and clients have to be addressed. Eric: I see stronger partnership and synergy developing between the law firms and clients, not just from the legal perspective but also on the technology used. A lot of those requests and trends will be driven more from the clients and attorneys. Do you think “self-service” will be a common term associated with IT? Marcus: It depends on what the service is and who the consumer is. We’re already seeing clients offer self-service of simple applications to their users. Nowadays, many firms are deploying the standard set of applications that the whole firm should have access to, and they are making available additional applications on-demand to users who need them. From that perspective, self-service is here now and will continue to grow. IT in general has also started to embrace self-service to itself; firms who have virtualization technology may create a standard server template and make that available to other members of IT to streamline and simplify the process of bringing systems online. We’ll continue to see that trend grow. However, I don’t think we’ll see a lot of cross-pollination between the two due to the complexity of many applications that require configuration and setup by knowledge workers who understand those applications. Judi: For the longest time we all had our datacenters onsite and managed everything related to them internally. Many of us today are seeing those datacenters move off-premises — either to fully hosted managed technical solution environments or to outside datacenters. Eric: It’s becoming increasingly common to put technology in the cloud, making it easier for provisioning and requesting additional technology. And if those requests extend beyond the IS perspective and into the user area, I do see a switch or at least some change toward more self-service. Clive: I think everything’s going toward the commodity-type industry where datacenters and the cloud will be the norm. Of course, at the moment, it’s still very green technology — there have been many publicized cases about Google clouds crashing. Business continuity is one of the big issues, so until that’s sorted out, I don’t see the legal industry really picking up on that. Will it be possible to generate revenue out of the technology operations area? Eric: Personally, I’m not sure generating revenue is something firms will approach on a large scale. I suspect IT will continue to be, as it’s always been, a cost of doing business. Allocating costs to different areas may occur, but I’m not sure that will be a source of revenue. Marcus: As the term “private cloud” proliferates and our industry begins to understand how to leverage them and frame their cost, I think we’ll start to see firms standardize Peer to Peer the quarterly magazine of ILTA 37 year in one