Ride the Lightning

Executive Summary of 2019 ILTA Legal Tech Survey Released

October 7, 2019

The International Legal Technology Association has released an executive summary of its annual technology survey of law firms. The full survey will be released later this month, available for $500 to ILTA members. The survey results were compiled from 537 firms representing more than 116,000 attorneys and 240,000 total users. About two-thirds of respondents were from firms with 150 lawyers or fewer.

The executive summary, prepared by Jim McCue, director of information systems at the Rodey Law Firm, showed a clear trend of firms moving more of their functions to the cloud. Seventy-two percent of firms said that their adoption of cloud-based technologies will increase over the next year, capping a four-year trend of firms each year saying their use of the cloud will increase. That is consistent with our own client base, though of course our data is more anecdotal.

70% have payroll functions in the cloud, with 7% planning to move them to the cloud.

Other functions with significant percentages already in the cloud or being migrated there were:

• Email security
• Email archiving
• Email
• E-discovery

Just 12% say their accounting and finance are in the cloud, but another 16% say they are migrating those functions there. 23% of firms have plans to migrate to a new accounting system over the next year, of which 64% plan to stay with a firm-hosted system.

For those not enamored with the cloud, what do they see as the biggest barrier? Top of the list are cost (50%) and security (33%), followed by performance (30%), reliability concerns (26%) and client restrictions (25%).

As McCue points out, cost, security, performance and reliability are typical concerns for any application change, while firms' concerns about issues such as ownership, regulatory compliance and client restrictions appear to be declining.

Somewhat surprising, at least to me, was that the survey revealed a slow adoption of artificial intelligence.

ILTA's survey found that just 7% of firms say they have an active AI project in place. Another 4% say they have a group that is testing AI tools, and another 10% say they have one or more AI tools in production. That adds up to just over 20% of firms that are using, testing, or preparing to use AI.

By contrast, 54% of firms say they are not presently pursuing AI options (down three points from 2018) and another 25% say they are researching AI options.

Given that AI is being adopted at a snail's pace, it is interesting that, when asked what technology will create significant change in the legal profession over the next three-to-five years, AI was the second most-common response, at 37%, behind only cloud at 39%. Analytics were listed by 4% of respondents.

Other topics covered in the survey include server operating systems (with use of Windows Server 2012 still outpacing Windows Server 2016 and a healthy 11% still on Windows Server 2008), desktop operating systems (with Windows 7 still the primary O/S for 31% of firms), and word processing software, where most firms use either the 32-bit or 64-bit versions of Microsoft Word. As readers know, Windows 7 reaches its end-of-life in January. I sure hope the laggards are planning to upgrade.

100% of all firms are using some version of Word. No surprise there.

HT to Bob Ambrogi.

Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., President, Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
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Digital Forensics/Cybersecurity/Information Technology
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