Briefing Frontiers 2023

It’s finally here, folks – the Briefing Frontiers research into law firm strategic direction and intention for another year. Much like the way we all manage work, its pages are rather different to how they appeared only a few years ago. We’ve invested in making the big findings and main messages emerging from this flagship polling cleaner and clearer, and called on an even wider range of leadership roles for their perspectives. Briefing has long banged the drum for pulling business functions away from operating as silos, and bringing areas together is very much a theme of this year’s narrative.

Let’s start with some good news. The vast majority of the 72 senior strategic leaders who ticked our boxes this year don’t see less investment in transformation, innovation – call it what you will, but often enabled by new or evolving tech – in the coming year.

That said, change also costs time and effort. There may also be work on in terms of reviewing priorities – do we want efficiencies right now, or a future-proofed firm faster, for example? Almost half of respondents don’t think they’ll have all major systems in the cloud for at least another five years, and a quarter don’t yet have a business-wide data strategy.

And a first for Briefing – we have new ‘satisfaction’ rankings for different sets of systems. All with a keen eye on the wider context of course – supplemented by lots of commentary from those questioned about experience on the ground , plus the perspectives of all our 2023 expert partners. Our thanks to them all: Aderant, Catalyst BI, Intapp, LexisNexis, NetDocuments, OneStream, Peppermint Technology and Thomson Reuters.

Get your copy of Briefing Frontiers 2023 in the Briefing app now:

• Download and read Briefing Frontiers 2022 via our app on Android
• Download and read Briefing Frontiers 2022 via our app on iOS
• Read Briefing Frontiers 2023 on your web browser

Or if you prefer it the ‘old-fashioned’ way, download and share our publication as a pdf.

Budget behaviour: strategic investment expectation through uncertainty

One fifth of strategic leaders say their firm has already reached the milestone of having all core management systems – such as practice, document and case – in the cloud. However, one third believe it will be another two years for all areas to make the move, and 30% give themselves a strategic five-year stretch.

Satisfaction survey: systems sitting underused or in need of attention