Summary of 2010 predictions for legal technology

Are you too busy to read all of the predictions for 2010 about the technology used by law firms? We asked our SydneyPLUS consultant librarians to take on the task of reading several blogs and articles for you and provide a summary.

Next, we decided to ask our team to report back to us a list of predictions that appeared on the majority of the sources we consulted. Here is what 2010 appears to hold for legal technology according to the "wisdom of the crowds" online:

1. More applications will be developed for mobile phones (e.g. iPhones, BlackBerry), more firms will support the use of these devices, and there will be more competition.

2. Social networking (e.g. LinkedIn) will become more important to firms.

Obviously, when you try to summarize so many sources, some of the details fall to the side, but feel free to read some of the many 2010 predictions made by the experts, editors, etc. working with legal technology, and we feel you will agree that these two predictions seemed to be shared.

When we asked one of our SydneyPLUS consultant librarians for the “most interesting” prediction of 2010 that he reviewed, he cited the prediction about the importance of touch screen technology, similar to tablet computing, in terms of the future development of web sites, a prediction made by many experts, such as Steven Matthews and Dennis Kennedy.

For a reality check, we compared the 2010 predictions in legal technology to the 2009 predictions by Dennis Kennedy. Spoiler alert: his predictions from 2009 are nearly identical to the predictions made for 2010, which can be interpreted many, many ways. The simplest explanation is that predicting what will happen in legal technology from year to year is naturally going to have some repetitiveness because it often takes more than a year for the predictions to come true, and it certainly takes time for predictions to become true for everyone.

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Some of the blogs and articles we consulted in no particular order:

Jason Plant, "Top 5 Legal IT Technologies of 2010," No Option for Law Firm!, 1 January 2010: http://tinyurl.com/ye97vo4

Neyah Kane Bennett, "Pondering the Year Ahead in Technology, The Connecticut Law Tribune on Law.com, 5 January 2010: http://tinyurl.com/yctuj4r

Steven Matthews, "Web Law Predictions for 2010," Slaw.ca: http://tinyurl.com/y8toekq

"Nine Legal Technology Trends for 2009: The Year of Hunkering Down," DennisKennedy.com, 29 April 2009: http://tinyurl.com/dma6mu