Priorities for new lawyers are changing. Can the legal industry keep up? — — from law.com by Annie Datesh, Natasha Allen, and Nicole Hatcher, Atrium
As the legal field continues to move forward, it is well-primed to place greater value on technological advancements, diverse leadership, and healthy work cultures over settling for the status quo.
Excerpts:
Yet the legal industry these lawyers are joining is evolving, and now increasingly hosts a new cohort of professionals—those shaped by technology and innovation, and who value diversity, mentorship, and efficiency over homogeneous workplaces with minimal coaching and exhausted capacities.
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Amid a strengthening job market, why are jobs in a generally well-respected industry being looked over in favor of other industries? One reason could be the legal industry’s notorious lack of progressiveness. The industry’s technology landscape is one such area of slow growth; its lack of diversity is another.
The legal industry’s long-standing dismissal of technology, while slowly changing, is fairly well known. While legal technology holds enormous potential for law firms, the industry as a whole has been famously slow to adopt modern technologies or meaningfully innovate on the traditional law firm business model. Why? For smaller firms, money can be tight, and solutions can be expensive.
The good news is that the legal industry is slowly but surely becoming more receptive to the benefits of evolving its traditional approach to the business and practice of law. Legal technologies continue to offer increased efficiencies to law firms, should they elect to adopt them, and the call for diversity and other cultural improvements within firms and the legal industry more broadly is on the rise.
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Those players in the legal industry who are able to recognize prevailing industry trends now will be in the best position to act on them.
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Big money is betting on legal industry transformation — from forbes.com by Mark Cohen
Excerpts:
Law has been big business for decades, but only recently has significant venture capital, private equity, and entrepreneur money been pumped into the legal sector. Last year saw an eye-popping 718% increase in legal industry investment, and this year’s capital infusion through the third-quarter has already surpassed last year’s $1 billion total and could well double it. Capital is turbocharging customer-centric providers that are leveraging technology, process, new skillsets, and data to transform the legal function and the delivery of legal services.
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Teaser alert: what’s to prevent Amazon, Google, or some other tech giant from entering the legal space, creating a global platform, injecting billions into infrastructure and talent, creating a global legal services hub that connects consumers with global legal delivery sources as never before imagined? Short answer: the inclination to do so.
Legal delivery has morphed into a three-legged stool supported by legal, technological, and business expertise.
Digital workplaces are the future for the legal industry — from abovethelaw.com by James Lo
The speed of business is accelerating, and digital workplaces are answering the demand for a better way to work, by providing a single platform to manage content, people, and applications.
Excerpt:
The consumerisation of enterprise technology has led to an increasing expectation from lawyers, clients, and business users alike that the legal technology they are using in the workplace for collaboration, knowledge management, transaction management, and more should be as useful, intuitive, and user-friendly as what they are already using at home on a day-to-day basis.
Digital workplaces are answering the demand for a better way to work, by providing a single platform to manage content, people, and applications. As law firms review their technology strategy for the next three to five years, there is an opportunity to create digital workplaces that will match how lawyers will want to work in the future. Within a digital workplace, a lawyer will have access to relevant data and content, collaborate with both clients and colleagues, share knowledge, and solve problems, all in real-time, from anywhere.
At the same time, clients are expecting firms to be using data, artificial intelligence and other technologies to predict outcomes, reduce costs, improve transparency and ultimately add value.
Is this the future of (low-cost) healthcare? — from computerworld.com by Johnny Evans
A Zipnostic pilot program in New York hints at how Apple tech could transform healthcare.
Excerpt:
The thing is, the home visit isn’t by a doctor but an onsite “care coordinator” equipped with a full set of professional testing equipment and direct video contact with the doctor.
The coordinator runs through tests using a high-resolution camera, ultrasound, EKG, glucometer, blood pressure, oximeter, and other state-of-the-art equipment, all of which is controlled using Zipnostic’s own apps.
Test data is made available to the real doctor at the end of the camera, who can take control of the testing procedure and provide an on-the-spot medical diagnosis based on real data.
The idea is that a diagnosis can be provided at around a fifteenth of the cost of a visit to the ER, and that the data driving the diagnosis can be much more accurate than you get from, say, a video chat using an app.