The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/480238
WWW.ILTANET.ORG 69 our responses. Clients are putting a lot of demands on firms to act more like businesses, and that's driving a number of changes from a staffing perspective. Firms are looking for professionals who have the ability to think and act strategically and can help implement strategic plans. They want staff with keen financial abilities who can help manage costs and efficiencies and create new fee arrangements and billing approaches. What roles do you envision will develop in the next few years? Randi: Looking first to our core group of technologists, I see the CIO or director of IT becoming a key executive position in law firms, if they're not already established. There are some unique opportunities in leveraging social media and exploiting the convergence of personal and business computing environments. The nature of client confidentiality and pressures to comply with federal mandates provide some great career opportunities for individuals with security backgrounds. Financial analysts, especially those knowledgeable in big data, can create some interesting opportunities in partnership with more traditional marketing roles. Law school graduates might look more to expanding knowledge management roles in law firms. HR personnel are looking more and more like talent scouts these days. And traditional marketers are now client sales and service managers. That list goes on and on. Oliver: A number of firms are looking into having chief pricing officers who are focused on new ways of being more efficient and creating billing processes and approaches that will address their clients' needs. We're also seeing chief strategy officers come into play. These are positions designed to take advantage of the firm's strategic plan and drive the implementation firmwide. These are not necessarily individual roles but rather team roles, so it's not just one person responsible for implementing the strategic plan or for creating new pricing models. In many cases, a variety of folks will be put on the team across practice groups and from various departments within the organization. Betsi: 2012 research we commissioned indicated we can expect a 14 percent increase in the number of legal marketing and business development professionals between then and now. Much of this growth is to support some of the key paradigm shifts in law firms Your documents. Integrated. cleanDocs is the most advanced software on the market for managing metadata risks for desktop and mobile users. Fast Remove metadata in sub-seconds Secure Remove 100+ metadata types Enterprise Enforce corporate cleaning policies Flexible User interaction with some policies Unified Metadata management for all TRY NOW Unified metadata management for desktop and mobile www.docscorp.com/unified