With smaller firms still dragging their feet when it comes to new technology, Roger Smith provides a word of warning: keep looking over your shoulder
A recent American Bar Association (ABA) study raises the question of the extent to which smaller legal practices (and, by implication, those serving poorer clients) are using technology. Small firms are just not adopting technology in the headlong way that larger ones are—particularly those in the commercial sector. Is a split emerging between commercial and consumer firms over their adaption to technology? And what should small firms do?
Reshaping the sector
The US study found that small firms had adapted to remote access so that lawyers could work outside the office (available to 84% of respondents); they were settling on Windows as the operating system of choice (up from 46% to 59% in a year); pretty well everyone was using email; and 60% held records on the cloud, 13% of whom may well be heading for a fall because they take no additional security precautions. Tablets were on the march, with a slight shift from Apple iPads to Microsoft
