Ride the Lightning

Highlights of the ILTA 2015 Technology Survey

December 2, 2015

Hat tip to Bob Ambrogi for sharing some early highlights from ILTA's 2015 Technology Survey. Hat tip to his source, Jobst Elster. The report is 269 pages and was compiled based on responses from 420 law firms comprising 88,000 attorneys and 185,000 total users. Law firms with less than 150 attorneys made up 66% of the responses.

If you go to the link referenced above, you will see that copies of the survey are free to ILTA members and $500 for the rest of us.

Unsurprisingly 23% of the survey questions involved information security. Jobst reports as follows:

• Encryption of laptop hard drives, e-mail, removable media and smartphones is in high demand. As an IT provider and an information security firm, I can totally verify that!
• Mobile Device Management (MDM) is now mainstream, with 52 percent of respondents using it.
• Respondents said the three biggest security challenges they face are balancing security with usability (31%), user acceptance and behavior (24%), and a tie for user education and awareness (22%) and firm culture (22%).
• Security issues ranking lower than expected were client security requirements (14%), BYOD/mobile devices (12%), and cloud apps/data security.
• Security awareness training programs continue to gain momentum with 49 percent of firms now having them in place. This surprised but pleased me. We have a slide in our presentations that says "Training, training, training – did we mention training?" There is no replacement for training the carbon-based units that so often compromise security!

Elster’s post offers some non-security highlights, as follows:

• The number of firms using Windows 2012 Server as their primary service has gone up to 31 percent from 18 percent in 2014 while the number running Windows 2008 has gone down to 68 percent from 80 percent last year.
• Nearly three quarters (73 percent) use Windows 7 (64-bit) is their primary desktop OS.
• 52 percent of firms have BYOD smartphone policies in place, up 5 percent from 2014.
• 41 percent use a mobile time entry/recording product and 25 percent use a “passive, automated” time capture tool for billable activity.
• 51 percent use business intelligence (BI)/financial analysis software compared to 53 percent in 2014.

A few more findings that surprised Bob:

• More than three-quarters of firms do not have any specific knowledge management system. Like Bob, I would have expected that number to be much higher.
• A quarter of firms (27 percent) are evaluating or testing the Microsoft Surface Pro. This surprised but delighted me because I think this is a true laptop replacement.
• 46 percent use enterprise social networking tools (e.g., IM, chat) for internal or client communications. Yup, this surprised me too.

Thanks to Bob and Jobst for getting the word out. Always a very revealing survey – and one that is always cited by legal tech experts. But $500? That's my gambling money for my next cruise. I'm going to rely on Bob and Jobst.

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