This week's Throwback Thursday, we reflect upon the information technology sector with the February 2003 issue of Legal IT and Kieran Flatt’s article What the future holds.
Flatt’s article reports on the results of a Legal IT and Open Orchards joint survey into law firm’s technology buying trends. Based upon the responses from 52 senior technologists from UK top 100 firms (the majority of respondents) and leading firms in Australia and the United Kingdom on investment trends in: - hardware – laptops are starting to represent a significant investment for legal IT departments
- software and services – practice management systems are the primary focus for investment, and
- communication systems – the battle between the PDA and the smart phone continues however the PDA remains more popular.
The article also includes forecasts from Richard Susskind, author of The End of Lawyers and Commoditising Law. Sharing his predictions for investment trends in the years ahead, Susskind’s perspective back in 2003 appears to be dramatically different to that expressed in his more recent works. Predicting the consolidation of IT investment, Susskind encourages more steady and measured action on the part of law firms noting that:
“law firms have generally been too quick to move on to the next thing when they could more effectively focus on what they have already bought”
