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Lawyers Still Lag on the Technology Front
Lawyers still lag behind the curve when it comes to taking advantage of most of today's Web 2.0 applications, concludes the ABA's annual Legal Technology Report, which ABA Journal editor Ed Adams summarizes in this month's issue. The ABA survey, based on responses from 850 lawyers nationwide, found that most lawyers rely on Web sites and e-mail newsletters to stay current on news. A minority read blogs, and even fewer -- a scant 2 percent -- actually maintain a blog. Just 10 percent of lawyers follow news through RSS feeds.
As for social-networking sites, which appeared to have gone "mainstream" when Martindale-Hubell linked its attorney profiles with LinkedIn, as of the date of the ABA survey, only 15 percent of lawyers had joined one. Perhaps that's because lawyers are still too busy tethered to their work -- 76 percent of lawyers are using mobile devices like smartphones or BlackBerrys, up from 49 percent just two years ago.
Law firms have also been slower than the rest of corporate America to maintain robust, interactive Web sites, according to this Am Law Daily story. Says Stephen Roussan, president of a Web development firm:
Considering the size of some of the firms in the top, say, 250, there are still law firms of substantial size that have relatively poor Web site offerings, surprisingly poor Web sites... If you compared the top 250 law firm Web sites against another 250 corporate or financial services firms of similar size, [you would find] that as a whole, the law firm group would lag behind in terms of the depth and quality of their Web sites.
While some firms are beefing up their Web presence, the work requires considerable time and resources. Price quotes from different site developers ranged from $80,000 to $1 million in one quote, to $10,000 to $200,000 in another. In addition, developers may need six months to a year to get the site up and running -- which seems like an eternity in Internet time.
Posted by Carolyn Elefant on September 3, 2008 at 06:20 AM | Permalink
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