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SHARON NELSON GIVES HER LEGAL PROFESSION PREDICTIONS FOR 2015

December 30, 2014

David Bilinsky, a friend and colleague of Sensei’s Sharon Nelson, authors the blog Thoughtful Legal Management. He recently did a post where he asked his thought leader friends their predictions of what is in store for the legal profession in 2015. Sharon was one of those thought leaders and here is her response:

  1. Cybersecurity is now universally the chief worry of large firms. We have already concluded that we cannot keep determined intruders out. While law firms will continue to try to keep them out, 2014 showed the mantra shifting to “detect and respond.” My prediction for 2015 is that those who hack into our systems will spend a lot of time and effort to make detection harder. What do you do when breaches are all but invisible, even to the best of the best? I suspect we’ll find out.
  2. The popularity of tablets that can really take the place of a laptop (I wouldn’t travel without my Microsoft Surface Pro 3) will soar.
  3. Now that IBM has announced that Watson will enter the legal market, you can bet that Watson will replace humans at an ever-increasing rate. Watson can do the legal research and analysis in near real-time, can predict outcomes (should you settle or go full steam ahead?) and search data to determine the probable budget for a case. The list goes on and on, but I believe Watson is a much greater danger to legal jobs than Legal Zoom and its brethren.

See the entire blog post here.