Social IRM Engagement Chart
Social IRM (noun) (so-shal eye-ar-em): the discipline of managing relationships between influencers (ie: bloggers) and brands (ie: LexisNexis, Westlaw, etc.) by offering real value with the goal of exciting, maintaining, and harnessing positive word of mouth. Used mostly by marketers and forward-thinking professionals.
Prism Legal‘s Ron Friendman liveblogged (a/k/a real-time blogged) Richard Susskind’s discussion of the future of the profession at ILTA 2009. Here are the Top 10 disruptive legal technologies on the list:
Document Assembly. Has already changed markets. Providing document assembly online allows for economies of scale. Charges and hours don’t have to relate, making this technology “disruptive.
Always on Connectivity. Lawyers can, and are expected to, be on call 24/7. Deal with it.
Electronic Legal Marketplace. Your value in the a frictionless marketplace. Clients can select legal services in the electronic marketplace and even choose to go with non-lawyer alternatives.
E-Learning. Law schools have long been falling down on the job. The Internet can revive learning with realistic simulations.
Online Legal Guidance. Interactive advice systems in the “latent legal market” (see Suskind, The Future of Lawyers). Sounds like self-guided document automation.
Legal Open-Sourcing. A la Wikipedia. Crowd-sourcing communities of interested individuals can result in better answers than throwing the problem to a single individual. Consumers more likely to talk to friend with similar problems than a lawyer.
Closed Legal Communities. See Legal Onramp. Clients and In House Counsel can pool legal information and check a common knowledge-base before consulting pricey outside counsel.
Workflow and Project Management. High volume, low value work can be made into off-the-rack solutions; making certain lawyers into de facto project managers. Project management requires significant training, but lawyers aren’t getting any. This is a disruptive trend because it highlights the fact that as efficiency increases, billable hours decrease.
Embedded Legal Knowledge. In the future legal knowledge will be built into compliance systems making the contributions of highly-trained counsel less necessary except for unusual assignments.
Online Dispute Resolution. Dispute resolution as a service. Services like CyberSettle versus time spent in Court or in the arbitration system.
Once you snatch the pebble from my hand ...
I recently published this guide for the involuntarily solo to help out the swelling ranks of attorneys displaced from law firms or newly minted from law schools only to find themselves flat on their assets. To my surprise, months after publishing my piece I found this entertaining post called The Number One Reason My Startup Failed. In it web developer Fred Jabre describes going through some of the very experiences that solo’s enjoy every day: edge-of-your seat excitement, being your own boss, triumph, and ultimately tragedy as our hero scores a near miss but still ends up working for The Man. Brother I’ve been there. Not only did this post parallel my struggle with the practice I started, it managed to dredge up bitter-sweet memories of my own dot com escapade - a $250,000 money pit eLawCentral; like the Tucker Torpedo and the Apple Newton that site was the answer to a question nobody asked. Thanks a lot teaBUZZED. Now I’ll have to spend another 3 years in therapy.
Airtime Mobile Billing
Airtime is a billing solution designed to scale from a single user (solo) up to large firms (Allen & Overy recently bought 2500 licenses). The company says that it is focused on the mobile billing market where it can add the most value. Diane Conde, Chief Operating Officer for Airtime, says the company’s target market, small to mid-sized firms is proving to be a challenge for the predicable reasons: resistance to new technology, cost, and the usual group-think that goes into firm-wide technology decisions. Competition is also a factor, and the mobile billing sector is heating up.
Feedback: If you’ve used Airtime or have an opinion, please share your experience in our comments section below or send them to yours truly, Hacker in Chief, at mhedayat@mha-law.com.
TechnoLawyer ABA Techshow
