This past week’s ILTA conference was full of great insight about disruptive technologies, virtual law practice and the changes that are expected in practice management as a result. I wasn’t able to attend the conference in person, but I managed to collect materials and information presented at key sessions. Here’s what I picked up without the travel expenses and jet lag.
The Legal Current blog posted about an ILTA session entitled “A New View of the Automated Law Firm.” The session explained how the commoditization of legal services is leading to the need for automation of the workflow in law practices. Document assembly and automation will help to streamline the delivery of legal services to meet the consumer demand for legal services based on a fixed fee model. Here are the slides from that presentation.
Darryl Mountain, expert on disruptive technologies and document automation, and Marc Lauritsen, co-chair of the ABA elawyering task force and author of The Lawyer’s Guide to Working Smarter With Knowledge Tools, presented a session entitled “Harnessing Disruptive Technologies”. The slides for that presentation are here. They covered the nature of disruptive technologies and look at technologies that can be used to create “substantive legal work.” The presentation slides cover document assembly, web-based document automation and virtual law practice. Lauritsen covered choiceboxing, an interactive decision support system which has multiple potential forms of application in elawyering and choice management. The slides also list two stumbling blocks to the use of disruptive technologies in law practice: “1. the knowledge acquisition bottleneck and 2. ethical rules of the legal profession.” (more…)