The term “information age” is a bit of a misnomer, considering, as Drinker Biddle & Reath chief data scientist Bennett Borden said in a recent kCura webinar, “Information is everything we deal with.” For lawyers, it's a “most fundamental resource, as well as our most fundamental product.” This is because all of legal comes down to facts and, in the information age, facts are contained in electronic data.

“Our job is to figure out how to get at that information,” he noted. And with technology both wearable and mobile, more data equates to more information about a person and what they are doing. “We're awash in data like we've never been before,” Borden said. “Our challenge then becomes, how do we find what's meaningful in all this data and apply it to what we're trying to solve?”

From the general counsel to the associate, finding those nuggets of truth amid seas of data will continue to change the way work is done. Here are some of the ways the lawyer's role will change in the years ahead: