Fifteen years ago, the world of legal IT looked very different from today. Dinosaurs still roamed freely along the corridors of law firms, and the concept of a PC on every desk seemed an unnecessary extravagance. What use, after all, would lawyers have for this expensive equipment? Computer systems were regarded as necessary only for the accounts department and as word processors for secretaries.
In the early 1990s some of the more innovative law firms began to implement a new kind of system: document management. This enabled documents to be stored centrally, with access from any terminal in the firm. The concept was revolutionary, as it wrested control of documents away from secretaries and enabled lawyers for the first time to work with their own documents. Within a few years most large firms had installed document management and the falling price of computer hardware had made it economic to provide all lawyers with access.
