Tech in 2010

by Tom McNichol

What's the legal tech outlook for 2010? Well, for one thing, a lot of people are counting on it being a better year than 2009. When the economy and the stock market went into free fall in late 2008, many law firms cut or froze their spending on technology, hoping to limp through the year with more or less the hardware and software they already had. With the economy now looking healthier, firms are likely to step up technology spending to update their equipment. Here are three trends that are sure to drive legal tech next year.

More Laptop Choices
Last year saw continued growth in the market for netbooks, the small, inexpensive laptops that many lawyers use as a second or third computer. Now, makers of a relatively new type of laptop called an ultrathin hope to attract users who want both the portability and longish battery life of netbooks and the performance of a full-size laptop at a price somewhere between the two.

Ultrathins are?surprise!?on the skinny side, generally less than an inch thick. Many weigh as little as three pounds, compared to the seven to ten pounds of a typical full-size laptop. Most ultrathins are priced in the sweet spot between cheap netbooks costing a few hundred dollars and $2,000 full-feature laptops. There are now close to a dozen ultrathins on the market, with more on the way. Among the top-selling models so far are the Dell Latitude E4200 (starting around $1,700), the Sony Vaio Z series (from $1,770), and the Apple MacBook Air (starting at $1,499). Ultrathins debuting in 2010 are likely to be even cheaper. Taiwan-based Asus, maker of the popular Eee netbook, is already offering an ultrathin with a ten-inch screen: the Eee PC 1008HA, available online for about $370.

Ultrathins are designed to answer users' chief complaint about netbooks: They're underpowered. Netbooks come with tiny screens (usually no more than 11 inches) and relatively feeble processing power, but ultrathins offer bigger screens (up to 14 inches) and faster performance, thanks to speedier chips. That means attorneys can perform tasks on an ultrathin that are difficult or impossible on a netbook?such as running multiple programs, or viewing large video files. Ultrathins also offer somewhat longer battery life than netbooks do because of their efficient architecture, but there's still room for improvement: The MacBook Air, for example, runs a mere five hours on a single charge, barely half a workday for most lawyers.

Still, ultrathins are filling a niche for users who like the portability of netbooks but are frustrated by their lack of power. When it comes to laptops in 2010, thin is in.

Social Nets Just for Lawyers
If 2009 was the year of huge online social networks like Twitter and Facebook, then 2010 might well be the year for smaller, more targeted social networks. With the big social nets, lawyers looking to connect with other attorneys have to sort through tens of millions of users to pick out the right people. Social networks specifically targeting legal professionals are intended to solve that problem.

Lawyers, who as a group tend to be somewhat slow adopters of new technology, generally seem to be comfortable and even enthusiastic about social networks. A recent survey of nearly 1,500 attorneys found that more than 70 percent of lawyers belong to an online social network?up nearly 25 percent over the previous year. And it's not just the young whippersnappers; the growth was 30 percent among lawyers over age 45. The survey, conducted by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell, also showed that 65 percent of respondents had an interest in joining an online professional network designed specifically for lawyers.

Interestingly, Martindale-Hubbell is one of the companies that stands to gain from the popularity of law-related social nets. In 2009 it launched Martindale-Hubbell Connected (www.martindale.com/connected), a social network exclusively for legal professionals. The site currently has more than 20,000 registered members and more than 500 user-created groups.

"We've really seen an explosion in the number of groups lawyers are creating online," says Laxmi Wordham, a vice president at LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell. "The groups can be geographically based, or centered around practice areas or legal organizations. The more targeted the group is, the more active it seems to be."

Connected isn't the only law-related network on the Web. The ABA now has its own social network, called Legally Minded (www.legallyminded.com). The site is a kind of legal portal, highlighting breaking legal news, legal blogs and tweeting, as well as job openings.

One of the first social nets for lawyers was launched in 2007 by Bay Area trial attorney Steven Choi. LawLink (www.lawlink.com) currently has about 7,000 registered members and adds about 300 new members each month.

Attorneys can create personal profiles on the network and control which content other people have access to. Even just establishing a profile page on a social network can reap indirect dividends. LawLink profiles are "search-engine optimized" by adding keywords and tags so that the member's profile will be more likely to appear higher up on a search results page.

One of the challenges law-related social networks face is getting time-strapped lawyers to participate regularly on the site and add their own content.

"It's not easy to get attorneys to post content, because lawyers are busy," says Choi. "Even if you go to a large social network site like LinkedIn, you see there's not much lawyer-generated content there. But we have found that attorneys post content on Twitter because it's easy to do. So that's made our Twitter forum popular."

The chief advantage of law-related social networks?that they are solely composed of legal professionals?is also a potential disadvantage as more companies enter the market. If someday there are a dozen or more law-related social networks, each serving a specific geographic area, practice area, or ethnicity, then the number of connections they can offer will necessarily be limited. A social network of thousands of lawyers can make for riveting online debates. A social network of a handful of lawyers is just plain sad.

The New Windows
Just in time for the economic rebound comes a new version of Microsoft's Windows operating system, Windows 7. It went on sale in October, but most law firms are waiting until the new year to decide whether to upgrade or stick with what they have. (Windows 7's server counterpart, Windows Server 2008 R2, was also released around the same time.) Many firms declined to switch to the much-maligned Windows Vista when it came out nearly three years ago, so now they're running operating systems that are getting a bit long in the tooth.

The early reviews of Windows 7 are all basically saying the same thing: It's a considerable improvement over Vista (which isn't saying much), but it isn't a game changer. Microsoft, it seems, has chosen to make modest changes and not rock the boat too much.

One welcome advance is that Windows 7 is a faster, more lightweight operating system than Vista, which was too bloated to run properly on many netbooks and small laptops. Microsoft wisely has focused on getting the basics right, and for many users it comes down to one essential question: Will this thing even load in my machine? With Windows 7, the answer for most users is yes. The new OS is basically a streamlined version of Vista; the hardware requirements are the same, but Windows 7 is the two-door sedan to Vista's SUV.

Of course, Microsoft couldn't sell many copies of Windows 7 if it were simply a more compact version of Vista, so it has thrown in some new features that improve the user experience somewhat.

One is an augmented version of a function called Aero, which lets users navigate smoothly through multiple windows displayed on the screen. With the Aero Peek feature, hovering the cursor over a taskbar at the bottom of the screen immediately isolates a specific window, while all the other windows are displayed behind it in a "shadow" mode. It's a fast way to toggle among multiple files without going through the hassle of closing out windows and opening up new ones.

Also, the Aero Snap feature will instantly maximize a window to full-screen display. There's also a nifty aspect for displaying two windows side by side?great for comparing two legal documents to spot differences. And finally, there's the Aero Shake mode: Simply shake the cursor vigorously and all of the windows go away, sort of like turning over an Etch A Sketch and shaking it. The new Aero features aren't earth shattering, but they're a clever way to simplify the common problem of navigating through multiple windows.

Windows 7 has more in common with the Mac OS than anything else Microsoft has ever produced, a clear admission that when it comes to the look and feel of an operating system, Steve Jobs got it right. The new Windows 7 toolbar is a thinly disguised copy of the Mac toolbar, and the new Windows Media Player makes playing multimedia almost as easy as it is on a Mac.

In short, Windows 7 isn't so much a bold step forward as an admission that Vista was a serious blunder. For many firms, the most compelling reason to upgrade will be that their present version of Windows is starting to show its age. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much the same reason law firms upgrade their lawyers.

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