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Legal technology purchasing surveyed
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: November 6, 2015
Each year, the International Legal technology Association (ILTA) conducts a survey of law firms to see what they’re buying these days.
The 2015 ILTA legal technology survey, the 10th annual, was distributed to about 1300 members of the organization. Law firms were categorized by size: small (1-49 lawyers, 41 percent of respondents); medium (50-199 lawyers, 40 percent); and large (the rest).
Here are some of the results.
Security is finally moving into the legal IT consciousness. Security management replaced email management as the primary concern of the respondents, and security assessment/ software purchases ranked fifth in projected expenditures.
The top tech trends noted by the respondents included cloud computing, mobility, security, virtualization, AI & analytics. The movement to the cloud remains slow but steady, with 60 percent of survey respondents projecting that less than 25 percent of firm software and service solutions would be cloud-based within the next one to three years.
Legal technology purchase amounts seemed to depend on the size of the firm—the larger the firm, the more money was spent per attorney, although very few firms spent more than four percent of firm revenue on technology.
The top three influences on tech purchases were internet research, peer recommendations, and ILTA conferences.
The top five tech purchases were laptops/notebooks (67 percent), desktop hardware (60 percent), network upgrades (51 percent), printers/MFDs (49 percent) and antivirus/antispam software (40 percent).
Ninety two percent of respondents said they use outside technology consultants (up 2 percent from 2014 and 11 percent from 2013).
Firms outsourced various technology services, including website design/services (70 percent), printer repair/maintenance (49 percent) and spam/virus filtering (40 percent).
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) firm protocols were promulgated for smartphones (71 percent) and tablets (59 percent), only 28 percent cover laptops, while 28 percent indicated that their firms have no BYOD policy.
Word processing: Microsoft Office add-on purchases decreased considerably from 12 to 6 percent, while Office upgrades stayed level at 18 percent. MS Office 365, introduced as a new category in 2015, was purchased by 13 percent of surveyed firms and 11 percent plan to purchase that product within the year.
If you’re interested, the entire survey can be found here: http://insidelegal.typepad.com/files/2015/08/2015_ILTA_InsideLegal_Technology_Purchasing_Survey.pdf