One of my Big Themes in my writing and speaking in 2003 will be what I call “Client Driven Technologies.”
Maybe I’ve gotten a little impatient with the snailish pace of adoption of cool technologies in the practice of law, but I know for sure that it irritates me to see how clients of law firms must pay a big price because their law firms do not use technologies that would streamline work, promote efficiency, improve communication and control costs. Whether you look to the Dupont Legal Model or to simpler, targeted projects, there’s much that can be done by both law firms and, more importantly, innovative clients and legal departments. This area is definitely one to watch.
I’ve created a page called the “Client Driven Technologies Resource Center” on which I will try to collect useful resources on this topic.
I’m also speaking twice on this topic at the ABA TechShow in Chicago in April. I’ll eventually put copies of my handout materials for those two presentations up on my site, but two new pieces – Placing Your Bet on Client Driven Technologies and Outside Counsel Inside Counsel Partering: Through Technology to the Virtual Law Firm are linked to from the resource center page.
Please let me know about other resources and I can add them to the list.

I added two new articles to my web site.
The first is The Coming Battle for Control: Predictions for Legal Technology in 2003 – this year’s version of my annual article on what to expect in legal technology. I purposely avoided blogs and wireless to focus on some bread-and-butter practical issues. This article is the first place I unveiled my “third age” of legal technology idea. The article originally appeared in a shorter version in the January issue of ABA’s Law Practice Magazine, but that issue was not yet posted to the web when I checked.
The second recent article is called Technology To Go: From Wired to Wireless and Beyond. It appeared as a feature article in the Feb/March issue of Law Office Computing. This topic is getting to be an annual tradition as well. This area of tech is a moving target, to say the least, articles are almost dated as written, but I try to focus on some practical ways to think about what you need.