The ABA Law Practice Division's Legal Technology Resource Center has released the second annual ABA TECHREPORT, a comprehensive publication exploring how attorneys are using technology in their practices.
ABA TECHREPORT is divided into 10 distinct topics. In each article, a legal technology expert digs into data from the ABA Legal Technology Survey Report and shares their analyses, impressions and predictions for the future. This year showed some interesting discoveries.
David Ries, co-author of "Locked Down: Information Security for Lawyers" and practicing lawyer in the areas of commercial and technology law and litigation, noted some key observations on security trends:
- While there is a low incidence of data breaches allowing unauthorized access to client data (1 percent overall), any exposure of client data can be a major disaster for a law firm and its clients, and precautions should be established;
- Use of various encryption tools by attorneys remains low: 25 percent have email encryption and 14 percent reported that they password protect their documents;
- Despite the risk of data loss through major disasters (such as a fire or hurricane), only 56 percent of respondents report that their firms have a recovery/business continuity plan (22 percent responded that they do not have plans and 22 percent said they did not know).
Tom Mighell, senior consultant with Contoural, Inc., and author of "iPad in One Hour for Lawyers," discovered the following trends in mobile technology:
- Lawyer use of laptops and tablets to create documents has decreased by about six percent since 2011, likely due to the increasing use of mobile devices;
- Instant messaging/chat services have become more popular in the last year 44 percent report using an IM service, up from 33 percent last year;
- Lawyers are still hesitant to use virtual assistants (only 4.1 percent of responding lawyers currently do) but a third of respondents are taking advantage of voice-enabled virtual apps such as Siri and Google Now.
Published: Mon, Dec 22, 2014
