Login | April 26, 2024
A year in tech trends, part 1
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: December 26, 2014
This year brought “more of the same, with indicators of great change to come” in the legal tech realm, according to Aderant’s 2014 SmallLaw Survey.
Aderant, makers of legal case management software, started conducting annual tech surveys in 2009. Their 2014 survey report features feedback on a series of questions from 227 firms in 13 countries, split about 50/50 between firms who employ more or less than 50 attorneys.
The primary change driver deduced from this survey is the change wrought to fee structure by ”the global economy”—another way of saying “upgrades in client education about legal fees.”
That education, brought about by information available on the Internet, which makes it a tech story, has led to numerous fee shifts in the ways in which law firms get paid, which go under the general nomenclature “alternative fee arrangements (AFA’s).”
AFA’s include “new demands for reporting, panel arrangements, and the rise of in-house counsel and outsourcing,” as well as stronger bargaining positions for current and potential clients. This will lead to major economic changes in the legal industry, according to many people who write about such things. In fact, the survey found that, since 2010, the number of firms involved in AFA’s has doubled, or even tripled, and that fully a quarter of law firms now do them. Half the firms felt pressure to do so.
Aderant has developed a theory around two different styles for relating to these oncoming changes, in which firms are either “tigers” or “bears.”
Tigers are firms which are responding to the market be becoming more “outer” focused, putting resources more into hunting down new clients than into their current infrastructure. They comprise a little over half the firms surveyed, but there were fewer tigers trending over the last couple of years.
Bears are more “inner” focused, leveraging current assets to expand income. They are maybe a quarter of firms.
A third option, of course, is cutting costs
Time will tell which approach will be the better, the survey said, noting that the animal strategy employed should be taken into consideration when making technology purchases, and the survey found that more than 90 percent of firms were in the process of upgrading their systems, and almost all were investing in some technology.