Earlier this year I peered into my crystal ball, conjured up Johnny Carson's Carnac, and set forth
five legal technology predictions for 2008. I also pointed to the predictions of others, but conspicuously missing was the Dick Clark of such predictions — Dennis Kennedy.
The wait is over! Dennis has unleashed his must-read 2008 predictions on LLRX in an article entitled, Eight Legal Technology Trends for 2008 — Good Times, Bad Times or Hard Times in Legal Tech?
Please read the article and reply with your thoughts. For the most part, I agree with predictions 1-3 and 5-8, but couldn't disagree more with Dennis on number 4: The Death Throes for Email?
Ouch, Dennis. That's my home turf!
Dennis begins:
"We're all buried by email. If you have a BlackBerry, you're buried all day wherever you are at and you feel like you can never get away."
This idea that people are buried by email is a myth largely propagated by companies that sell email alternatives. We're all addicted to email, not overwhelmed by it. Maybe an addiction isn't healthy, but it sure is fun. Those of us who can't help checking our email one last time before bed or before the plane takes off or [insert guilty email pleasure here] must find it enjoyable on some level or else why bother?
As it turns out, email is extremely well-suited to human beings. Recent research has shown that people don't multitask well. Email breaks up our world into bite-sized chunks. When you're inside an email message, you tend to focus on just that message. The world around you disappears for a minute. That's healthy.
I think people tend to use the words "email" and "overwhelmed" together because email often creates "tasks." So it's not the email that's overwhelming, it's the tasks they contain. People who feel overwhelmed by tasks may need a better task management system or an administrative assistant or both.
Regarding CrackBerrys and their ilk, Dennis has stated on several occasions that he does not use one. The people I know who use these devices (myself included) like being connected to our email all the time because we can process it when we have nothing better to do (or don't like what we're doing) but don't have access to a computer. We feel lost and out of touch when we don't have these devices with us.
Dennis continues:
"At the same time, some studies indicate that 80-90% of Internet email is spam, and a large fraction of internal email is not much better than spam."
As I've noted many times, the volume of spam sent is irrelevant. All that matters is what you actually receive.
If you currently use an ISP for your email, switch to Google Apps Premier Edition. No one has a better spam filter than Google. If you maintain your own Exchange or other mail server, check out Postini, which is owned by Google.
As for internal mail, your colleagues want to keep you in the loop for reasons both good and bad. If you switch to an email alternative, these messages will simply take a different form. Etiquette training is the answer here, not technology.
Dennis adds:
"You increasingly hear people saying that "email is broken." The real difficulty with email is that we are asking email to do far more than what was intended for. Email is for sending, well, email messages. We use it for everything — from a document management system to a collaboration platform."
That's what we thought three years ago so we started using Basecamp, a Web-based project management system. Basecamp features its own messaging system that keeps conversations in threads. In fact, we used Basecamp with Dennis when he wrote TechnoLawyer NewsWire.
But Basecamp failed.
By and large, our clients and contributors found the messaging system less convenient than email. When someone sends a message, you receive an email alert. You then have to click a link in the alert to respond in your browser. Rightly so, people just wanted to reply in their email program.
You might think a little extra work is worth the reward — threaded discussions. Nope, as I recently discovered first-hand. We produced our eBook using Basecamp. As a result, none of the messages associated with our eBook exist where I want them — in my email program and in my searchable email archive.
Instead, they're in Basecamp, walled off — a prison we're escaping this month as we migrate to Google Apps Premier. You see, Google got it right. Don't force a new messaging system on people. Let them use email. But give them document collaboration (Google Docs and Spreadsheets) and a dashboard with file sharing (Google Sites).
Lots of other companies get it too. Witness the explosion of email archiving solutions. Whether regulated or not, most companies nowadays want the ability to store and search their email.
Dennis writes further:
"People are gradually finding that RSS feeds, news readers, instant messaging, phone calls, and even face-to-face meetings are often better and more appropriate than email for certain types of communication."
That's certainly true, but none of these replace email, except perhaps instant messaging for those under the age of 25. But instant messaging doesn't scale even if you have two or three monitors.
Dennis continues:
"Some even suggest that the trend toward social networking platforms, like Facebook, is in some part due to the failures of email."
A prediction of my own and a wager to boot: I'll bet good money that email will outlast all Web-based social networks, especially those that eschew email. Instead, look for the opposite — better email clients that acknowledge what we've known all along — email is the ultimate social network.
Dennis adds:
"Email has also become unreliable as spam filters and overloaded inboxes make it difficult to be certain that email messages are actually delivered and received."
See my discussion above about Google and Postini.
Dennis concludes:
"The trend to watch is the movement away from email into appropriate tools for the task at hand. Two trillion instant messages were sent in 2007. Firms with policies against instant messaging will find that their clients will insist on the use of it. It has become difficult to send large files by email at a time when it has become essential to send large files. Watch for use of online services for the transfer of large files to grow. Almost every communication alternative to email can be expected to grow in 2008. Email will not die as a tool for lawyers, but 2008 will demonstrate how rickety and sickly the email system has become."
While training people to use the right tool for the job is critical, email's power will continue to grow because people use it when they want to create a searchable record of something noteworthy. No other technology can match email in this regard, especially with all the investment in archiving and storage (Google Apps Premier, at the low end of the enterprise spectrum, now provides 26GB of storage for each email account). Expect to see smarter email clients, even more storage, and better ways to search and mine our growing email collections.
Email isn't in its death throes. It's just molting.
Thoughts on this or Dennis' other predictions? Please reply!
About TechnoEditorials
A TechnoEditorial is the vehicle through which we opine and provide tips of interest to managing partners, law firm administrators, and others in the legal profession. TechnoEditorials appear first in TechnoGuide, and later here in TechnoLawyer Blog. TechnoGuide, which is free, also contains exclusive content. You can subscribe here.
