Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!  🙂 This week, the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) released ILTA’s Technology Survey Executive Summary. Here are a few highlights.

ILTA’s Technology Survey Executive Summary is 17 pages(!). This year’s survey reports the input of 541 firms representing about 26,000 attorneys and approximately 275,000 total users.

There are several topics covered, including a discussion of:

• Resources,
• Trends associated with the distributed workforce,
• Tech trends for large, mid-size and small firms, and equity trends (i.e., where all three sizes of firms are in close agreement regarding the trends,
• Cloud adoption, and
• General technologies and trends

Drilling down a bit further, here are three notable sets of results:

Unified Communications Technology: Microsoft Teams is used by the most firms at 42%, rising from just 4% two years ago! Zoom is the only other platform that has seen a significant rise during that time – from 8% last year to 26% this year. Equally notable is that respondents who selected “None/Not Applicable” has dropped from 28% two years ago to just 8% this year. Here is a graph to illustrate the trends:

IT Department Metrics: When asked which metrics are used to measure your firm’s IT department performance, a whopping 63% selected “None/Not Applicable”! Believe it or not, that’s an improvement from last year’s 67%. Here is a graph to illustrate those trends:

Cloud Solutions in Use: When asked which solutions being used are cloud solutions (or are being migrated to the cloud within the next 12 months), the numbers rise steadily for eDiscovery and litigation document review solutions based on the size of the firm from 36% to firms with less than 50 lawyers to 66% for 350-699 lawyers but drop back down to 44% for firms with 700+ lawyers. That’s a curious result and it makes me wonder who is answering these surveys. Assuming those numbers are correct, it illustrates that there are still firms out there who could be in the market for an eDiscovery solution at some point. Email related systems (including archiving and security) are the most consistently used in the cloud across all firm sizes. Here is a graph to illustrate those trends:

There’s a lot more trends where that came from! ILTA’s Technology Survey Executive Summary is available here (you have to be an ILTA member or have an ILTA login due to attending ILTACON). The full Technology Survey will be available for purchase for $500 for ILTA Members and $800 for non-ILTA members around mid-September.

So, what do you think? Are you surprised by any of the results? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Graphs Copyright © International Legal Technology Association

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