Peer to Peer Magazine

65 WWW.ILTANET.ORG same number of people to oversee, but they will work in different capacities. As infrastructure is outsourced to the cloud, law firms will keep fewer tech support personnel in-house. Those resources will shi to training and security. While CIOs today are highly focused on strategic planning and execution, these areas will continue to grow in importance. As the use of the cloud spreads and other advances in legal technology emerge, there will also be an increased base of outside vendors and service providers to handle tasks currently overseen by in-house staff. That will affect the CIO's ability to operate on a strategic level because of shiing staffing arrangements. CIOs will have a more focused in-house IT department pared down to a handful of critical positions. Within the next 10 years, the CIO of a 200-person firm might only directly manage four employees — one full-time helpdesk employee and three employees to work with cloud vendors. keep up with demand, law firm aorneys and staff are becoming increasingly mobile and want to use a range of devices from laptops to smartphones to tablets. Some are eagerly embracing new apps and ways of communicating, which complicates the CIO's priorities of security, efficiency through application selection, integration and end-user training. The CIO of the Future While many CIO functions and priorities will remain the same in 2025, there will be some significant evolutions within the role. Consider how the technology that drives law firms has changed in the last 10 years. Smartphones have become ubiquitous, and everyone expects to have an internet connection wherever they are, whenever they want it. What's next? » The Cloud and Security: While there will be many changes in hardware and soware, the most significant changes will revolve around cloud technology. The cloud is already significantly affecting the way many firms do business by delivering services and soware over the internet, rather than installing them on end users' computers. These trends will become even more pronounced. As more law firms move functions to the cloud, the CIO's priorities will shi. Keeping data secure will become even more important and far more complex. Rather than nice-to-have features, law firm CIOs will need to implement security technologies such as encryption, intrusion detection, anti-phishing, new email security technologies and more. They will also need to oversee cloud-based technologies for security, disaster recovery and ease of integration. » Staffing and Vendors: By 2025, CIOs will lead a department that looks very different in terms of staffing and the types of work that must be managed. It will be more cost-efficient for cloud-based companies to oversee tasks for multiple firms, rather than for each firm to handle those tasks themselves. Between in-house staff and vendors, CIOs will have roughly the The Small Firm CIO of Today and 2025 FEATURES As infrastructure is outsourced to the cloud, law firms will keep fewer tech support personnel in- house. Those resources will shift to training and security.

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