Vol. 20, No. 207
This post is an apt one as many of us are in, or beginning our budget cycles for 2021. None of us could have foreseen and properly prepared for 2020 and we’re honestly still making some guesses as to what 2021 will look like. I have to say the title and thrust of his post irked me. First of all, the question, “Where will your law firm be in ten years?” is a very aged concept. Can you honestly answer that? Back in the 80s and 90s we were coming off ten year plans in favor of a shorter, more practical five year plans. Today, three years is more common. And given the further acceleration of technology, even that can be difficult. Second of all, I’m a big believer in “People, Process and Technology,” which means technology is the last of the things you think about. I get the Wolters Kluwer’s “The Future Ready Lawyer” report and the grouping of firms into Leading, Transitioning and Trailing buckets, but let’s be realistic. “Where will your law firm be in three years?” Read more at Law Technology Today: Law firms still aren’t budgeting for technology
Nick Milton does his best to remove the baggage and assumptions that come with our usage of the phrase, “Knowledge transfer.” His Boston Squares diagram of Ask, Tell, Search and Share help answer the questions of “What exactly do we MEAN by transferring knowledge? How is it transferred, and what prompts the transfer?” Be sure to read more at Knoco stories: 
Ruth Carter writes her post from the lawyer to lawyer framework, but frankly I see key concepts that help me as CIO to lawyer and CIO to anyone. Afterall, it has been my experience that assholery is not limited to just those with JDs. Ruth concludes with a sentiment that I think we can all agree to, “In a perfect world, asshole tactics and behaviors would be discouraged in law school as well as in law firms and all places of employment.” Read more at attorney at work: 
“Six men accused of carrying out some of the world’s most destructive hacks-including the NotPetya disk wiper and power grid attacks that knocked out electricity for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians-have been indicted in US federal court.” Hacking used to be used to describe bored computer geniuses looking for the ultimate challenge of bypassing computer security. These six are at an entirely different level. Read more at ars technica: 
In his post this morning, Jeff Richardson goes over the 2020 ABA Legal Technology Resource Center survey. There is some good information on iPhone and iPad usage in the courtroom. But what caught my attention is the data on mobile device management. “According to the survey, only 33% of all lawyers say that they can access their law firm’s network without any restriction. That number rises to around 40% for smaller law firms, falls to 28% for law firms with 100-499 attorneys, and falls to about 14% for lawyers at law firms of 500 lawyers or more.” The numbers struck me as very high, so I pulled out the ILTA Tech survey to compare. At the smaller end that survey says 57% have no MDM and at the high end only 5% do not. Different participants, different categorization buckets and more should show some variance, but not that much. Regardless of firm size, an MDM should be in place. Read more at iPhone J.D.: 
Ben Liu, from Kofax, offers up some document security tips. Some of his suggestions, like using strong encryption, are simpler then others. Some like using certificate technology, aren’t used as widely as they could be. Changing culture so that document security is an everyday concern isn’t easy, but well worth the effort in the long run. Read more at Legal IT Professionals: 
Stephen Abram found a great infographic about graphics. Ultimately JPEGs are for still images, and photographs; GIFs are for animations and PNGs are for web and complex images. And as we all know, TIFFs are for eDiscovery (just kidding!). There is quite a bit of information on these graphic file types. Read more at Stephen’s Lighthouse: 
Quite a bold claim this headline makes, but one quite inline with the hype surrounding AI. Baker McKenzie, its own “innovation” subsidiary, Reinvent and software developer SparkBeyond are looking to build something to gain insights into client needs. “The software will use data it collected from the firm’s previous and current matters, as well as data from third-party sources that provide news, economic and census information, to generate predictions of future risks for a client.” It’s an ambition project in predictive analytics and I wish them luck. Read more at Legaltech news: 
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