The five key findings or market trends are: increasing number of attorneys; increasing matter volumes (more work); margin compression (for law firms); and the move from outside counsel to in-house counsel for corporations. Unless I missed something, which is always possible, that’s only four. I would add one more myself, which is the growth among alternative legal providers, especially legal process outsourcers, which according to a report and graphic in January by Thomson Reuters’ Legal Executive Institute now take $1bn of the $437bn US legal spend and are expected to grow by around 30%.

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The conclusions of the white paper? ‘The legal technology market is burgeoning and just at the tip of its growth over the next five years.’ I don’t think anyone would disagree with that. ‘Adoption of various legal technology solutions is still minimal, especially in smaller and mid-sized legal departments and law firms.’ Again, this is fairly well trodden ground but I would have liked to see the results that lead to this conclusion. ‘The forces impacting the market will require that both law firms and legal departments leverage technology in frequent and innovative ways in order to manage their increasing workload.’

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