ILTA 2022 Technology Survey Highlights
The executive summary of ILTA’s 2022 Technology Survey is hot off the press with the full survey to be published in September this year. The executive summary highlights are based on the survey responses from over 500 law firms.
A significant theme of the past year has been the continued impact of the pandemic and the flow-on effect in terms of the people and infrastructure resources needed by law firm IT departments to support virtual ways of working and changes to workflows.
Cloud adoption has played a fundamental role in facilitating collaboration for lawyers and staff working virtually. The survey highlights ~40% use in 2022 and up from just 3% in 2020. For larger firms, over 60% have migrated Document Management Systems to the cloud while accounting, finance and practice management systems are at around 10% cloud use. Time and billing cloud use for larger firms is at 38%, and two-thirds of firms surveyed indicated they will move time and billing to the cloud in the next 12 months.
Microsoft Teams has become the dominant unified communications platform. The survey highlights the explosive growth of the use of Teams from just 4% use in 2020 to 42% of all firms surveyed in 2022 for unified communications alone. The use of Teams including meetings, collaboration and chat would be must higher again. A standing-room-only panel discussion on Teams at the ILTACON 2022 event on Tuesday demonstrated the tremendous interest in extending Teams further to power engagement-centric workspaces while protecting sensitive data.
Information security remains critically important to firms large and small. Threat actors know that law firms of all sizes are an important target. More on this topic in an upcoming LPI article. ILTA is publishing a separate survey around security in 2022 and is leading the charge to educate and inform the industry.
Legal project management is firmly established in many firms with 80% of larger firms invested in LPM.
Overall, Cloud is seen as the technology or trend that will create significant change in legal technology with a response of 25%, up 9 points from last year. This was closely followed by AI/Machine Learning as a major trend with a response of 22%, up 7 points. Around 60% of larger firms are also using or considering Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
A future release of the full ILTA Survey results will be located in the ILTA resources section.
Also read top viewed Ai Legal article: The Role of AI in Legal Research.
