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FutureShock - Has Future Insight Ever Been More Important?

By ILTACON Europe Conference posted 10-30-2013 12:21

  

Rohit Talwar - CEO - Fast Future Research and Project Director - ILTA Legal Technology Future Horizons study.

Survive or thrive - choose your paradigm - In a fast changing highly uncertain business environment, our attitudes to the future can vary dramatically. At one end of the spectrum are those who believe our world is changing so fast that we should focus on making sense of the present and not even try to understand what might come next. At the other extreme are those who believe that current problems were caused by short term thinking. They argue that we need to step back to understand the forces, trends and ideas that could shape tomorrow and use those insights to make better decisions today. As futurists, we have sympathy with the former, but - by definition -  we have parked our tent in the latter territory.

The value of scanning and sense-making - For the legal profession, a perfect storm of global and local forces, trends, developments and ideas is brewing that makes foresight and innovative thinking possibly the most critical strategic priorities.  A combination of economic volatility, aggressive new market entrants,  regulatory changes, disruptive technologies, differing generational expectations and ever-more demanding clients are forcing a rethink of everything law firms do and how they do it. However, the answers cannot be based on what we do today - because those responses could be out of date long before we have had time to implement them. Hope is not a strategy - we have to scan for and understand what could shape the world over the next decade and prepare for a range of possible scenarios.

Keep pace or die trying? - At the centre of this disruptive new environment is the rapid emergence and continuous evolution of technology developments that are disrupting every business sector. The last two decades have seen the shift in emphasis from corporate systems to end user solutions running on their own devices. The internet and social media have created new platforms for raising awareness, client engagement, service delivery, research, data storage, collaboration and communication. Artificial intelligence, data mining and sophisticated knowledge management tools are emerging that could change working practices dramatically. So how can we keep pace with such a rapid rate of technology development and explore the implications for legal firms?

A groundbreaking study - To help explore these issues ILTA has commissioned the first known study exploring how technology could impact the legal industry over the next decade. The research was described as ground breaking and a catalyst for industry transformation when the emerging findings were presented in August 2013 at the ILTA conference in Las Vegas. The aim is to create a concise and punchy set of insights into how technology could permeate every aspect of legal activity and explore the resulting implications for business strategies and the management of IT in law firms.  The study was launched in January 2013 and the results will be published in early January 2013.

Attendees at the 2013 ILTA INSIGHT conference in London on November 14th will hear the results being presented for the first time anywhere in the world. This is a must attend session for those who want to gain a distinct march on competitors that chose to wait until December for the report itself. 

Full details on the study can be found here: http://www.iltanet.org/MainMenuCategory/Future-Horizons

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