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Our Thoughts on ILTA's Legal Tech Survey
Each year, the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) survey’s its members about trends in legal technology. In 2017, over 550 firms, large and small, responded to the survey. Things like cloud adoption, artificial intelligence, and document management systems are among the topics discussed in the survey each year. We like to summarize the survey with the topics we are most privy to and distribute a blog about our thoughts on these results. Without much further ado, here we go.
Cloud
It is no surprise that 77% of those surveyed say they plan to increase their adoption of cloud-based solutions over the next 12 months. Cloud was certainly a hot topic during ILTACON this past August and has been the topic of conversation across the industry for some time now. While security was the main concern for cloud adoption in 2016 and 2015, it is now less of a concern. The leading concern for cloud adoption in 2017 was cost. Reliability concerns, regulation factors, and expandability concerns decreased from 2016 to 2017. Barriers to moving to cloud-based document management systems were cost (39%), security (38%), and reliability concerns (32%). Security and reliability concerns decreased from 44% and 34% in 2016, respectively. Client restrictions and performance were also listed as barriers and have increased as a concern from 2016 to 2017. This makes sense because regulations may require that information live on an on-premise server rather than a cloud server.
Security
Overall, security and risk management was still the top annoyance to firms, however, it decreased from 39% to 34%. User acceptance and behavior was listed as the second largest security challenge (33%), while user education and awareness was close behind in third place. Managing change was also listed as a security challenge at 25%. While it does seem that security concerns have loosened up a bit, there are still firms out there that might want to tighten things up. It will be interesting to see how GDPR compliance affects this over this next year, as it comes into effect this May.
Document Management Systems
This year, ILTA surveyed firms about what DMS system they owned. iManage ranked first with 50% of all firms owning its DMS. Among the rest were OpenText (14%), NetDocuments (11%), and SharePoint (1%). Others like Woldox, Prolaw, Aderant, and “Other” hold the rest. Also, 4% of firms responded that this question was not applicable or that they did not have a DMS. While OpenText’s ownership decreased from 2016, both iManage and NetDocuments were stable at their respective percentages. Cloud-based DMS accounts for 14% of all DMS systems. Another important thing to note is that some firms are planning to migrate document management systems in the next 12 months. 5% of firms say they plan to migrate to NetDocuments, 4% to iManage, 1% to Worldox, and 1% to SharePoint. 86% are not planning on migrating in the next 12 months. iManage and NetDocuments ranked in the top 5 of outstanding vendors in terms of product quality, support and pricing. So, hat tip to our friends!
Overall
We look forward to this survey every year because it is a nice window into the world of some of our current and potential clients. It helps us identify pain points within the industry to better our understanding of how to approach our target. Overall, we are not surprised by the results of this survey. We can see that industry trends are certainly catching on and our solutions are crafted to meet the needs of any organization that utilizes the various systems our technology is connected with. We are going to keep an eye out to see how impacts of the GDPR, and how the DMS landscape will pan out over this next year. For more about our solutions, check out our technology page!