Having just returned from Techshow 2010 in Chicago, the ABA Law Practice Management Division’s annual trade show and CLE program extravaganza, I was struck by a couple of things. First, no longer did it seem as though every booth was focused on e-discovery. While there is no question that e-discovery is an important issue, I felt as though the issues the vendors focused upon were things like case management (and my friends from Time Matters and Legal Files were present), document management (ditto for Worldox and Fujitsu (Scansnap), legal research (Lexis for Office – Wow! and West’s new product) and other products designed to improve workflow. I, for one, was pleased to see this.
But that doesn’t mean e-discovery is passe or forgotten. Some vendors focused on it, as did some of the programs. Perhaps one of the better programs I attended was E-Discovery in Small Cases, a topic that is often forgotten. Many of my clients handle these “smaller” cases, and they are in fact the bread and butter of many firms. But the e-discovery vendors often focus so much on the big ticket (and big revenue) cases that they forget that these small potatoes are present and their value adds up too.
In future posts, I’ll talk more about these and other topics. And in my other blog, www.palegalblog.com, I plan to discuss why so few Pennsylvania attorneys attended.