Legal IT landscapes 2017

When will your firm have significantly more people than desks for them to sit at each day? When will you be able to move business-critical systems comfortably to the cloud? Can you report on key business data in real time? Do you have the tools to price client work both transparently and profitably? Will artificial intelligence transform your business strategy – and when?

It has been two years since Briefing last ran Legal IT landscapes – and the legal profession has changed dramatically over that period. After years of waiting to see if firms would bite at the Legal Services Act, the first wholly UK-owned firm has now opted for an initial public offering – and embarked on the strategic acquisition path that lay beghind that particular financing decision.

Spending disbelief?

In this context, the importance of a strategy for IT investment should be clear. Firms need to be factoring fast-changing developments – including in that technology itself – into their regular risk profiling and management processes. Ultimately, they need to make evidence-based decisions about which moves are truly business-critical to keep up with the increasingly varied competition.

Competitiveness, meet efficiency

We asked the Legal IT landscapes respondents to name (free text) up to five technologies they thought will have the biggest impact on how competitive and efficient their firm is over the next five years – and the outcome couldn’t have been clearer.

Clouding the issue?

If clients need to decide whether they trust their firms with sensitive data, firms need to decide whether they trust the cloud – which may well be informed by those clients’ preconceptions of what is and isn’t secure. When we asked – two years ago – whether firms would migrate “significant” systems (such as finance, practice management or CRM) to the cloud, one third said they expected to do so within two years. So that means by now!