Is the US the "spiritual home" of legal technology?  So Legal IT would have it.  What, then, are current and future trends?  (And I promise this is as close as I'll come to the "tennis without a net" custom of New Year prognostications never to be revisited again.)

Outsourcing, for starters, is the crazy aunt in the attic that nobody wants to talk about—with the brave exception of my friend Jim Lantonio, Executive Director of Milbank, who conspicuously off-shored technical and administrative support last year, so far with evident success.  Why so mum?  On top of the general sensitivity surrounding the politically charged issue, law firms have the added controversial layers of confidentiality and stratospheric client expectations about work product quality.  Legal IT posits that small and mid-sized firms may be the early adopters here, but I have a different theory:  Given the steep learning and adoption curve, and the sheer transactional scale needed to justify the upfront investment, I think the only firms in a position to recognize a meaningful return on outsourcing are the large firms.  My prediction?  The serious discussion pro and con on outsourcing will only begin when one or more large firms is discovered to be already doing it.

The always-sane Brad Robbins, co-founder of Baker Robbins & Co., identifies (a) centralization of data in firm-wide operations centers; and (b) record retention and email storage as the primary front-burner issues.  Partly this simply reflects law-land's catching up with the rest of the professional service sector, and financial services, in "back office" robustness in general, but the explosion of electronic data discovery has surely accelerated the trend.   Harris Tilevitz, CIO of Skadden, confirms that precisely those initiatives have been top of his agenda this year, and when asked what new or innovative technology he foresees coming, he comes up empty-handed.  Certainly in the post-9/11 world, business continuity and disaster recovery plans have moved up the priority list, and one way to deal with them effectively is by centralizing data (in more than one place, to be sure).

While the second half of the article devotes itself to the wireless world—Blackberry or Treo?  Laptop or smart phone?  On a "need to have" basis or just for the asking?—I find far greater interest in Brad's (and others') observations about how the nature of IT within large firms is changing.  To wit:

Five Years Ago	Now
Focus on HR, finance, basic wordprocessing, functional email	Focus on KM, CRM, collaborative tools
Key "end user" for IT was primarily staff	Key end users are lawyers
Investing in creating a hitherto non-existent infrastructure was order of the day	Getting the most bang for the buck out of existing systems is Job 1

Does this sound like your firm?