Professor Richard Susskind is well-known in legal technology circles and is the current president of the Society of Computers and law. In his book The End of Lawyers, he identified the top 10 disruptive technologies that he predicted would shape the legal services industry. In this personal view, and not that of my employer LexisNexis, I review where I think we are with these disruptive technologies.

Relentless connectivity

The first mobile handset I used (a Motorola 4500x) had a battery that weighed about 4 kg and was nearly the size of a Butterworths Company Law Handbook. Speech quality was poor. Now almost all lawyers are slaves to their Blackberry or Smartphone, with push email available 24/7. Nearly all law firms provide online access to document servers, with knowledge management systems or external legal information services available 24/7, too. That said, I have not seen this shape legal services, merely speed them up. It has merely increased the pressures on lawyers providing those services.