Where will Lawyers be in Tech in 5 Years?
b'Where are lawyers going to be in 5 years compared to now in terms of technology? Are we going to embrace technology and creatively find ways to use it, or lag behind?\\nIt’s a good question, and one that I address in today’s episode of nonbillable.\\nTranscript – Where will Legal Tech Be in 5 Years\\nHey there again guys. It’s Chris from TipsForLawyers.com here with another episode of NonBillable. You can find NonBillable at TipsForLawyers.com and navigate your way there. Not too hard. If you’re listening to this on iTunes, can I encourage you to leave an iTunes review? Helps it be a bit more visible and really helps me get some comments and some feedback.\\nIf you have a question, pop it in at Tips for Lawyers\\xa0or email it to me. Go to TipsForLawyers.com/contact. You can ask a question and I can address it on NonBillable. If you don’t know the format, NonBillable is where I spend 3 or so minutes answering a question, having a bit of a rant or giving some advice that might help you out in your day-to-day legal practice.\\nToday, I wanted to have a talk about technology. I was asked a question about where I see lawyers being in 5 or 10 years, or at least into the future, so far as technology is concerned. I’ve got to say I don’t see us being very far at all. The reality is lawyers are only now catching up with technologies they should have caught up with 10 years ago or 5 years ago.\\nYou’re seeing law firms that still don’t have mobile responsive websites even though 50% of the people visiting their website are on mobile probably getting frustrated and clicking away.\\nYou see law firms who have no earthly idea how to utilize social media. You see people with LinkedIn profiles that make you want to cry. You see people who don’t know how to engage on Facebook.\\nThe reality is lawyers are laggards when it comes to technology. Sure there are some outliers. There’s some people out there who are doing fantastic cutting edge stuff in technology circles, but the reality is in 5 years time, I don’t see much changing at all in the legal profession. We are barely keeping up. We’re probably behind the times. If technology gets further advanced, we might eventually catch on, but when we do, we’ll be 10 years behind again.\\nBit of a harsh message there, but the reality is we’re terrible at it. We’re not early adopters. We don’t like taking risks. We don’t like cutting edge technology because it might not work and, to be fair in a bigger law firm, it’s frankly cost prohibitive. Smaller law firms are going to be more nimble. They might adopt things. They might have more flexibility and less barriers in terms of policies and procedures that need to be in put into place or at least that they think need to be put into place that are going to stop them from being able to utilize new technologies appropriately.\\nBetween cost, policies and the general inhibitions of lawyers to take any risk of any kind whatsoever, I’d be amazed if we’re much further advanced in 5 years. We might have a few more tools available to us. There might be a bit more prevalence of dictation, for example, coming into force through people actually using voice recordings rather than through secretarial. That is coming into things now. Of course, it should have been done 5 years ago, but there you are. It’s another example.\\nI’ll be interested to see where we are and if this prediction turns out to be right, you can bet your bottom dollar in a few times, if things are what I just said, then I’ll be sharing this video again. This has been Chris Hargreaves from TipsForLawyers.com with another episode of NonBillable.\\nWhere are lawyers going to be in 5 years compared to now in terms of technology? Are we going to embrace technology and creatively find ways to use it, or lag behind?\\nIt’s a good question, and one that I address in today’s'