Predicting the future is easier when you only have to guess what’s likely to happen in the next 12 months. Some trends are easy to identify based on hints available the past few years. Sometimes, however, we’re surprised by new products or developments we didn’t see coming. Here are my best guesses for technology trends that will affect practicing lawyers.

Handheld devices, like Palm Pilots, Pocket PCs and cell phones will continue to add more functions and become increasingly useful to lawyers. Over the past year, cell phone manufacturers have added digital cameras, MP 3 players for downloaded music and palm based applications to their handsets. Combining a cell phone with a contact list, calendar and to-do list makes for an incredibly useful tool.

While you could carry a palm based handheld and a separate cell phone, it’s nice to have your entire contact list available to look up telephone numbers when you’re out of the office. Instead of having only a duplicate copy of your telephone and address book, you can have your firm’s entire contact list at your fingertips. The leading combo palm phones are the Handspring Treo 600, Palm Tungsten W and Kyocera 7135.

We carry the office everywhere. Technology permits us to work from the office, at home or anywhere in between without missing a beat. We can take our phones with us and handle client work. We can sit in a park or in stores that have wireless internet connections and with a laptop computer and wireless network card, connect to our office computer to handle e-mail and even access documents.

Mobility

Web based services like GoTo-MyPC allow you to open a subscription account so you can connect two computers over the internet. In my office, this service, which costs about $20 a month depending on how many computers are connected regularly, enabled my assistant to work from home during bad weather by opening programs and files on her office computer.

When I’m visiting a client, this service allows me to access copies of training documents or other materials from my office computer. Otherwise, I would have had to depend on someone being in the office to fax or e-mail that information.

I’ve also begun to use this service when I have to “look” at clients’ computers and can’t get to their office quickly, when I want to review how to do certain functions or to demonstrate products for potential clients.

Online tools for collaborative work are starting to become affordable and available to lawyers in smaller firms. Initially, such products were the province of the largest firms that could afford the requisite investment or fees for these services. As firms become comfortable servicing clients through e-mail and their websites, there will be more demand for collaborative tools to allow lawyers to work interactively online with clients.

Remote access technology, in the wrong hands, though, can do significant damage. A recent story in The New York Times described the arrest of a man who had taken advantage of some of these new tools to dial into strangers’ computers, steal their personal information and set up bogus credit card and bank accounts. He installed a “key logger” program surreptitiously on a number of computers used for customers renting them by the hour.

Security

Key logger programs track each keystroke, storing them in a log that can be read and analyzed. These programs are marketed to parents and employers who want to monitor their children’s or employees’ online activities. The culprit used a key logger to capture customers’ user IDs and passwords.

Once that was accomplished, he could dial into their home or office computer and search for such information as bank account numbers, Social Security numbers and other data associated with identity theft. In this case, the perpetrator was caught. But a word of caution is in order for those who use publicly accessible computers.

Wireless technology will continue to provide more flexibility in where we work — but care must be exercised to avoid compromising our data. Even technology consultants can become complacent. My newest laptop came with a wireless network card. When I got a wireless adapter for my home office, I didn’t think I would have to set up the encryption on it — until a neighbor told me she could connect to the internet through my wireless network!

Lawyers should be careful about using wireless technology in office environments, since firms routinely use databases for case management and billing that require reliable connections. In the coming year, expect continued improvements in wireless standards in speed, distance and reliability. Internet security will play a larger role as more people get faster connections from a variety of places.

Courts

The courts’ adoption of Adobe Corp.’s portable document format (.pdf) for electronic filing has made that format a standard for transmitting documents among lawyers and adversaries, as well as courts and government agencies. Scanners are now equipped with Adobe Acrobat software, allowing documents to be scanned directly into .pdf format.

After years of seeking the perfect scanner solution to convert images to editable text, lawyers have realized the bulk of documents they sought to scan were fine to store as graphics. As firms have upgraded photocopiers to digital copiers, they have gained high speed scanning capabilities along with printing and photocopying functions. The case management and document management products are increasingly supporting the ability to scan into .pdf format and connect scanned images to client or caserelated records. As a result, we’re finally starting to see the possibility of more digital and less paper based offices.

Trial courts also have experienced change in the past few years as court reporters can now make real-time transcripts available instantaneously to parties in court and worldwide. The use of projectors, slide shows and other visual tools also have changed the presentation of trials. As these tools get less expensive and simpler to use, their use in courts will increase.

Phone enhancements

I was introduced recently to a company that, after major successes in Europe and Israel where the parent company is based, is beginning to market its services here. Among its telephone enhancing features, Makitel offers a service called Follow Me, which lets users provide a toll-free number to colleagues and clients that will ring at a list of telephone numbers that can be changed at any time quickly and easily at Maklitel’s web site.

For example, if you’re at a client’s office regularly on Thursday mornings, in addition to listing your office and mobile phone numbers in Follow Me, you can configure it to ring at the client’s office only on Thursdays during the times you’re there.

Maklitel also offers the ability to record conversations by pressing two keys on your telephone. Imagine that you’re returning a telephone call to a potential client while in your car (with a hands free headset, of course). The prospect is ready to provide information for a retainer letter. Instead of trying to write it on a scrap of paper while driving, press the keys and record the information. Later, you or an assistant can access it from a phone or on the web. The service includes other useful features like easy setup of conference calls and recording billable time on your telephone.

You can be sure there will be competitors for these services, especially now that the Federal Communications Commission is allowing us to keep our existing telephone number when changing service providers or even from land lines to cell phones.

E-mail

One hope is that vendors will help us address spam — unsolicited e-mail — that is clogging inboxes and taking valuable time to eliminate. After receiving up to 200 or more items a day, I realized my e-mail program (Time Matters 5.0) can be configured to separate e-mail from people for whom I have an address in my contact list from those that do not.

While I still have to comb through the spam to look for legitimate mail from sources not yet in my database, the really critical client related e-mail is easier to handle since they’re the only ones in my main inbox when I check mail. Spam eliminator programs should include both “black listing” and “white listing,” i.e., defining known e-mail addresses as “not spam” while designating unknown addresses as probable spam.

Incorporating features

This points to another trend already under way in legal software — adding more features from other types of programs and incorporating them into established products. For example, DATAtxt, the makers of Time Matters, which has had two way links to the leading legal billing programs, now sells Billing Matters, its own time and billing program, either separately or within Time Matters. Billing vendors like Alumni Computing, the makers of PCLaw, have continued to add calendar and case management features, further blurring the distinctions between these applications.

We can expect to see more overlapping of functions in the coming year. Hopefully, this also will come with a commitment by firms to begin using more of these programs’ functions to streamline office procedures and allow firms to respond more effectively to client requests and needs.

One of the wild cards in making predictions is what will happen to Corel’s WordPerfect. Since its peak of market share in the early 1990s, it’s been steadily losing customers. As the corporate world standardized on Microsoft’s Word, law firms were forced to switch to eliminate the need for clients and their own staff to convert documents back and forth.

This past summer, Corel was bought by a venture capital firm. It remains to be seen whether, despite its still strong but diminishing presence in the legal market, WordPerfect can remain viable.

Upgrading

Speaking of staying viable, law firms that last upgraded computers in anticipation of year 2000 problems are due to upgrade again. They and other industries in the upgrade mode will help improve sales figures for the leading hardware manufacturers. When they start to shop, they will find more reliable operating systems, less expensive hardware, flat screen monitors and several flavors of laptops, including innovative tablet computers, which include effective handwriting recognition capabilities in addition to traditional laptop functionality.

At the same time, there are some global economic trends that will effect how law firms function in the coming years. Nationally, there has been a move toward multijurisdictional practices and allowing lawyers from one state to service clients elsewhere. This will attract potential clients and service existing clients.

Many software vendors directed at specialties within law are starting to combine web and office functions in single packages. As the economy expanded during the early 1990s, engineers and software programmers came from India and other countries to help design new computers and programs. Corporations needed assistance in complying with myriad immigration and government requirements.

These rules became significantly complicated in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist strikes. The result has been a number of programs for use by immigration law firms and their corporate and individual clients to streamline the steps and forms required to complete a visa application or obtain citizenship.

These programs, and those for other practice areas, are still in their infancy, but the trend toward sharing specific information from law offices’ data with clients in other parts of the world is sure to continue.
According to Kroll Ontrack, a leading computer forensics firm, 93 percent of all documents produced in businesses in 1999 were created in electronic form.

The need to protect this data while ensuring its accessibility and confidentiality will continue to be a challenge. Lawyers also must be aware of their clients’ and their own file retention policies as more information stays digital.

Task based billing

Several other economic trends are converging and influencing the use of technology. Law firms doing insurance defense litigation or those representing large corporate clients are being increasingly asked to adopt the American Bar Association’s task based billing codes and submit formatted bills electronically to legal auditing companies for review and payment.

Many of these invoice processing companies along with insurance claims departments are located in India. The movement of these jobs offshore has had a profound impact on the job market for white collar workers. While there are potential issues of client confidentiality, even some large law firms are looking at how they can move specific functions overseas. This is a trend worth watching as it could have an enormous impact on the practice of law in a few years.

How to plan for the changes? The beginning of a new year is a natural time for reflection. Consider your current work and tools; then ask how well it’s working. Think about what procedures could use improvement and how to get there? In consulting with law firms, I often start by asking, “What’s working?” and “What’s broken?” These simple questions ensure we don’t break functions that are working well while examining the firm’s use of technology and office procedures to see what can use improvement or change. Look at what’s going on in other businesses, too. The trends that affect them will also affect lawyers.

Carol L. Schlein is president of Law Office Systems in Montclair, a training and consulting firm specializing in law firm automation. Her previous columns can be found on her company web site at losinc.com. Schlein runs quarterly meetings for Time Matters/Billing Matters users. For information about the meetings, contact info@losinc.com.