Will legal tech break out of its ghetto once more?

Technology occupies a curious space in the legal community. On one hand, City law firms fall over themselves to appear forward-thinking in relation to technology and lawyers have generally been eager to hop on the social media bandwagon. Likewise, lawyers became addicted to mobile gadgets years ago, with the BlackBerry quickly winning the profession's heart, even if a few are now casting lustful glances in Apple's direction.

But in many ways, the debate regarding technology for law firms as businesses has become ghettoised over the last 10 years. In the late 1990s, when the first tech-boom was in full effect and the IT-fuelled predictions of Richard Susskind were inspiring and irritating in equal measure, the topic was much on the mind of managing partners. At the time many firms were throwing money at IT, in some cases with little to show for it.

Over the years the efforts of technology vendors perhaps became counter-productive as they responded to the flash of interest by bombarding law firms with far more jargon-ladled announcements than the average partner could keep up with. It's an interesting contrast with what happened in consumer IT. The last decade has seen companies like Apple and Research In Motion (the latter this week launching its much-touted iPad competitor) crack the formula to make personal tech desirable, sexy even. The use of business technology, on the other hand, became regarded as something that never lived up to its promise or was a plain threat – a disruptive technology.

At some point, the profession must once more engage with institutional technology. And this looks a timely moment, if for no other reason than legal service liberalisation and alternative business structures will be closely linked to it. The adoption of internet-based computing systems, arguably the biggest shake-up in institutional IT for decades, could be another factor. A more subtle shift, which is alluded to in Legal Week Intelligence's upcoming Information Technology Report (ITR), is that staff satisfaction with IT has improved even as spending has been pared back over the last two years. By consensus, the vanity projects and white elephants of the first boom of law firm IT are a thing of the past. Law firms have increasingly brought in expertise by hiring chief information officers from outside the profession and IT teams have become better at delivering.

With firms once more moving into the investment phase it seems that technology will come to the fore. Indeed, the number of partners responding to the ITR has risen substantially in recent years. There is also the fact that associates uniformly think IT is more important than partners do. Tragically for law firm leaders – and journalists – separating the game-changing from the time-wasting will involve negotiating a ticket of techno-babble.

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