Legal secretaries, data entry clerks, and executive assistants rank among the fastest-declining professions this decade, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s no coincidence, with organizations increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and software solutions to handle routine and mundane tasks, and the robotic process automation field expected to be a $19.53 billion business by 2027, per Allied Market Research’s findings. But while unpredictably is now the only sure thing modern organizations can predict, disruption remains constant, and the pace of high-tech change only continues to accelerate? Many law industry leaders that we work with throughout our consulting and expert witness practices have still been painfully slow to upgrade their working model – and adjust their operating strategies to match. Thankfully in an age of growing disruption, a host of new technologies of every kind can help you minimize drudgework, maximize productivity, and learn to better anticipate and steer around shifts in workload or market demand.

But first, a few points of note that you should be aware of before beginning your digital transformation journey:

  • Over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are currently being produced by humans every single day – in other words, more than 1.7MB per second per every person on planet Earth. Likewise, every 24 hours, a staggering 306.4 billion emails and 500 million tweets are produced, with a whopping 90% of online information having been created in the last two years alone. As a result, businesses (and the legal departments which serve them) will be looking to analyze more than 10,000X more information within the next three years.
  • As we point out in bestselling book Make Change Work for You, the next 10 years will bring more technological change than the prior 10,000. Moreover, audience habits are shifting faster than ever, with 75% of consumers already having engaged in a new shopping behavior within six months of COVID-19’s arrival alone. That means your employer, and your team, can only expect to be hit with incoming disruption harder, faster, and from more angles than ever before going forward, and will have to move at a head-spinning pace to keep up with industry shifts.
  • Per recent research by Salesforce, modern organizations are now tasked with facing unprecedented levels of change in the marketplace, and adjusting to sudden and head-spinning shifts in customer demand. As a result, they note, learning to better leverage high-tech advancements to be nimbler and more agile is a goal that will only become more important going forward – and industry dominance can shift on a dime, even for market leaders.