Simon Fodden on Slaw writes that the 2008 ABA Legal Technology Survey reports that most attorneys stay current via websites and email newsletters; only a small minority reads blogs, and blogging is seen as geeky; RSS feeds are not used by most, social networks are only just now catching on and podcasts and online videos are for the kids.
Clearly it takes a generation – 30 years, say – for a technology to penetrate the profession … this large lag will mean that lawyers will continue to be perceived as – and will be – out of touch with what is actually going on in society. It also means, in my opinion, that there is a fairly large niche opening up here for an even modestly adventurous firm to position itself at the forefront of legal service through the use of even yesterday’s information technology.
There is certainly now a generation of lawyers out of touch with technology, but that “lag” will soon disappear. Use of the internet represents a paradigm shift in the use of technology. Waxing lyrical on this last year I wrote:
The internet has played a critical role in accelerating the commoditisation of IT, encouraging standardisation and, in many cases, increasing the penalties of using proprietary, closed systems. At the same time, by facilitating effortless and instantaneous communication in globally-standardised ways, the internet has placed zero distance between everybody and everything else. The network has become the computer.
I look at my children and I see them fully in tune with the internet, having both grown up with it (at secondary school). Neither is techie, but both are comfortable and conversant with most of what the internet has to offer: they have simply absorbed it as part of daily life. So too anyone born (in the developed world) since the mid 80s is a member of the “internet generation”. The lawyers amongst them will be reaching partner level in law firms in the next 10 years. My bet is that most will be far more in tune with “what’s going on in society” than their current counterparts and will no longer lag behind those in other professions who may be more tech savvy – because technology does not matter any more.
