If Nicholas Carr is right when he writes that the IT department is dying, where does that leave big corporate law firms? Same place they've been for a while now, behind the curve. But once the change comes, if it comes, we'll have to watch out for our jobs.
In his new book "The Big Switch", Carr says that we (meaning corporate IT departments) are all going to move all our computing and storage to centralized utility services like Amazon's S3/EC2. Meaning our services like document management, time and billing, and litigation technology are going to be hosted off-site. And when he says services, he means EVERYTHING. Email, Word-Processing, Intranet Phone Directories. Everything.
Need a practical example? Take Freshbooks, an online time and billing system with support for simple document sharing, projects for each client (you might know those as "matters"), and even optional snail mail invoices. It could run a practice of up to 20 attorneys today.
This won't happen just at the firms with mediocre, uninspired technology workers. In fact, it will happen there last if the firm manages to stay in business at all. No, the places at most risk are ironically the places with the best and brightest managers, CIOs, programmers, and network engineers.
It's already started in small ways (check your HR system), but it could snowball. With law firms in particular, there will be a mad dash to the exit once the first brave firm shows success with a new technology. You know how we no longer employ a full-time person to change magnetic tape drum disks in our server rooms? That's us in 20 years.
If you can't imagine the modern law firm without a locally-installed copy of Microsoft Word and accounting services provided by one of only two relatively poor choices (Aderant and Elite), then you are missing something huge.
After all, a secretary in 1950 would never dream of doing her partner's billing without her trusty index cards, right?
