The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/34686
“As we move to the cloud, there will be no need to have large IT staffs.” gotten far with this at all. So accessing information shouldn’t be viewed in terms of which device, but whether or not the information can be provided. What technologies will be fundamental for establishing the virtual practice? Eric: Connectivity and transparent security. A while back, when you were disconnected from the office it was simply your laptop. Then came the BlackBerry and smartphones, and now we have other devices. I see that continuing to grow, but focused less on consuming the info and more on interacting with the system. It’s not only the device being used, but also having security that doesn’t get in the way of performance. Marcus: Here’s the perfect definition of virtual practice: We have a client that needed to bring their firm live quickly, so traditional methods of buying systems and building out a network internally wouldn’t work. We signed them up with a cloud vendor, and they got all of their applications from cloud and SaaS providers, including phone delivered via the Internet. They have a physical office now, but for the first few weeks of their existence, they worked wherever they could find Internet access — mostly at home. They were collaborating and videoconferencing effectively, and it worked great. In law firms, you’re seeing more people working remotely and expecting that no matter where they are they’ll have all the firm’s services 40 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer available to them. So as the technologies continue to multiply and become more reliable and secure, the virtual practice becomes increasingly doable. Clive: That’s a great example. I think it’s going to come down to the cloud idea, though with the large firms it will be a long time before they actually switch to the virtual practice. The emerging legal practices in East Asia are already less reliant on the traditional support model and its associated overheads. Judi: A lot of things will affect the virtual practice in the coming years: voice over IP and having that capability at home; voice-to-text for voicemail; and products like Microsoft Lync, a next-generation converged system that combines desktop, text, video and voice in conjunction with a standard desktop phone or handheld device. And thin-client technology gives us the ability to present to our attorneys from wherever they are a full suite of applications. So the way people work, whether they’re using a PC-based platform, Apple-based platform or an Android device, all those things become almost immaterial in the virtual practice. With the demand for these technologies, will information and network security finally be a must-have in law firms? Clive: I think this a very 1990s issue. Requirements for network and data security should be a given. A firm’s Professional