What is the biggest technology-related issue facing lawyers today?

• Author: Whelan, David
• Position: Special Issue: Technology & the Practice of Law

The biggest technology challenge for Florida lawyers is education. Lawyers feel poorly prepared to use technology, with only 40 percent feeling prepared on leaving law school. (1) At the same time, most lawyers consider new and advanced technology to have an impact on their ability to practice law successfully. (2) The collision of this lack of preparedness and technology's impact may influence its adoption. In Florida, adoption of practice management systems is low, with large numbers of lawyers failing to use case management (77 percent) or document management (85 percent) systems. (3)

This dynamic is under additional pressure with the commentary to Model Rule of Professional Conduct 1.1, suggesting that lawyers be aware of changing practice technology. (4) This guidance means that, no matter how much or little technology lawyers use, they need to keep a weather eye on the landscape.

Education is difficult to acquire when it comes to technology, though. The legal profession used to have a multitude of publications--such as Law Office Computing --dedicated solely to technology and how lawyers use it. No longer. The survivors, often bar association publications, cover a broader swath now.

Just like legal research, there are two useful approaches: random and focused. A random approach is similar to reading a magazine. You will find information that is inapplicable to your practice mixed in with the useful. There are a variety of podcasts that you can download to an app on your phone or tablet. For example, The Florida Bar Podcast can be located on Legal Talk Network. (5) You can listen to podcasts at your leisure and store away the information until you need it.

Develop the habit of checking in. Download a podcast, but know that you can skip it if the first minute or so doesn't grab you. Similarly, you can follow some of the many blogs dealing with law practice technology--skim the headlines, as you do with a newspaper. A few examples are Lawyerist's tech posts and Bob Ambrogi's LawSites. (6) TechnoLawyer's BlawgWorld, a free email subscription, sends you posts they have found each week. (7) A newsfeed app, such as Feedly or Flipboard, and an email app can bring those post to your tablet or phone as well. The random approach will help you slowly acclimatize to new terms of art--two factor, hybrid cloud, ransomware--even if you do not have any particular need to know them at the time. It is similar to CLE in that way.

The focused approach is...