Three years ago, the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center condensed the annual Legal Technology Survey Report into easily digestible articles, called ABA TECHREPORT. Since its inception in 2013, ABA TECHREPORT has been a reliable resource for practitioners, firms, and legal tech companies, providing useful analyses of legal technology subjects and trends from the past year.
With 10 topics ranging from planning and budgeting to virtual law practice, this year’s reports are chock full of information and insight from our own technology experts. Whether you’re interested in the recent litigation technology trend towards normalizing mobile and tablet use, or the constantly evolving world of social media, our writers have you covered.
Take a look at each article:
- Technology Training, Mark Rosch
- Planning and Budgeting, Dave Bilinsky and Laura Calloway
- Security, David Ries
- Litigation and TAR, Stephen Embry
- Mobile Technology, Aaron Street
- Cloud Computing, Dennis Kennedy
- Social Media and Blogging, Allison Shields
- Solo and Small Firm Technology, Sofia Lingos
- Virtual Law Practice, Chad Burton
- Practice Management, Joshua Poje
Highlights from this year:
David Ries, Security
David Ries, a practicing lawyer in the field of commercial and technology law and litigation and co-author of Locked Down: Information Security for Lawyers, has noticed a staggering decline in encryption use amongst lawyers. Just 26% of those surveyed confirmed that they use encryption for email and confidential documents sent to clients. This is down almost 10% from last year. Read More.
Allison Shields, Blogging and Social Media
Allison Shields is a former practicing lawyer, co-author, and current President of Legal Ease Consulting, Inc. Allison discovered that the practice areas with the highest amount of bloggers included personal injury (35%), litigation (31%), and employment and labor (27%). She also found that of those who do personally maintain a legal topic blog, 42% responded that they had a client retain their legal services directly or via referral as a result of their legal topic blogging. Read More.
Dennis Kennedy, Cloud Computing
In addition to serving as the current chair of the Legal Technology Resource Center, Dennis Kennedy is co-author of several books on social media and collaboration, an ABA tech column writer, and half of a dynamic podcast duo on The Kennedy-Mighell Report. Dennis has found that – of the cloud services available – Dropbox once again topped the list at 58%, up from 51% in 2015. Other consumer cloud services also remained popular, with significant increases—Google Apps at 49%, up from 39%; iCloud at 28%, up from 21%; Evernote is even up from last year at 25% (16% last year), despite a lot of discussion about encryption and other security concerns in the press and among lawyers. Read More.