So the end of a another year of blogging. I started this blog at the start of 2009, right at the start of real turmoil in the Legal market. The worst recession in decades was in full swing and law firms were in a massive restructuring exercise that for some is still going on some two years later.
Over those two years in terms of Legal IT we’ve seen some of the big names of the past consolidate, some new players emerge and Legal IT become less niche in terms of IT and move closer to the main stream in terms of technology and demands on the IT departments.
In terms of this blog it’s been more successful than I could have imagined, it now averages about 1500 visits per month to the site and about 230 subscribers each day to the RSS feed. And this year I was short listed for the Computer Weekly blog awards.
So all that remains for this year is to take a look at my predictions for the top 5 Legal IT technologies of 2010 made at the start of the year.
#5 Mobile Applications
Well given the proliferation of iPads at ILTA and the rise of the Android and iPhone’s I would say I was right on the mobile device being big in 2010. But what about the Applications? Well until the devices become more widespread I don’t think there will much more than email or document access applications in law firms (there of course are plenty of Apps that can and will be used by lawyers as personal productivity applications).
#4 – Search
Lots of talk in 2010, with a few firms bringing in pilots for enterprise search. Cost, integration and the “separate application” is holding this back I suspect. For those firms though who are iManage customers the IDOL engine is being introduced as part of their WorkSite 8.5 upgrades, this will bring experience of a major enterprise search engine to those depts.
#3 – Office 2010/Windows 7
Now this may not be “live” in many firms in 2010, but who hasn’t started looking at one of both of these products during 2010?
#2 Instant Messaging
Starting to make waves in 2010. It will be a slow uptake (a bit like email was back in the early 90’s) but like email I’m sure it will take hold. Maybe Lync will bring it front and centre next year?
#1 Speech Recognition
Well I was wrong on this one! Maybe more lawyers typing their own documents combined with good workflow in Digital Dictation systems is enough to cope with the shift in secretarial/fee earner ratios?
So that’s it, I may have been slightly off the mark with some technologies. But the others, maybe I was just a little early but they are starting to make it into some law firms. What do you think? Leave me some comments on what you think have been the main technologies making their mark in Legal in 2010.
So finally to finish 2010 a thank you to Legal IT Professionals who kindly publish my content on their site. And a big thank you to all who read and comment both here and over there. I hope you all have a great Christmas and New Year!
Any predictions for 2011? Thanks for some really interesting posts over the year.
Re: dictation – my take on this is that it only really gives lawyers a great productivity boost when you dictate tasks or mixed task/typing which are time consuming to actually do, but quick to dicate (“can you please open file XYZ.. do the standard letter re: costs and check ABC..”).
Dictating long blocks of text doesn’t save a great deal of time -vs- typing it in my experience. The typist probably has a better typing speed, but by the time you have reviewed the output and corrected / checked it the overall time spent probably isn’t vastly less.
Voice recognition dictation seems like a dead end in this context as it is really only useful for dictating the text (it won’t go and open a file for you).
The new systems are a lot more accurate than they used to be, but so far as I can see the output still needs checking and I don’t think the end result is much quicker than typing yourself.
Mobile apps is an interesting area too (especially where tablets are concerned). It will be interesting to see in 2011 how Apple’s App-centric approach and RIM’s “apps are dead use the browser” strategy pan out.