practicehacker

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.

Earlier this year in my Smalllaw column I wrote about the use of location-based services and Twitter to create a real-time feed (posts, dockets, hearing outcomes, files, research, etc.).  Let’s call it a Casestream.  And while location-enabled applications such as Brightkite, Twinkle, and Loopt have been with us for a while, the advent of Google Lattitude means everyone can experience and potentially adopt such services. Just look at the potential of applications such as Foursquare. How much longer until the legal profession gets into the act?

Yesterday Facebook, the application that convinced a generation of soccer moms it was okay to post semi-candid pictures of themselves no matter how disturbing, bought Friendfeed, the best social application you’ve never heard of.  When I read the news I wept. No, seriously. I wept at the end of an era.

Freiendfeed makes me feel smart. Facebook makes me feel like I need a shower. Friendfeed brings out the best in users. It promotes discussions about cutting-edge topics and insights. Facebook brings out the worst in users  – many of them highly placed people who should know better – by soliciting the mundane and celebrating the average. See the difference?

I hope Facebook leaves Friendfeed alone, but I have no illusions. As it stands I’m positive that hordes of Facebook users will thunder into Friendfeed, choke it with pointless chatter, and leave it a disaster area when they move on a few weeks later.

If you find something online that’s worth keeping I hope you feel a little sad when it gets “discovered” and you know it’s about to lose its special character. That’s how you know it was worthwhile in the first place.

My slides for panel on Social Networks, Blawgs & Podcasts #abachicago tomorrow at 3:00 PM

View more presentations from Mazyar Hedayat.

For more information see http://new.abanet.org/annual/pages/Schedule.aspx

Follow the 2009 Annual Meeting on Twitter at http://twitter.com/abachicago

Using Seemsic web-based app. Works well but I think it only takes a single Twitter account … and no Facebook? What’s up with that?

Check out http://seesmic.com/web/index.html