Big Data is big news in litigation discovery — and predictive coding has arrived as a best practice to deal with the mountain of data. But that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. While Big Data looms large in the litigation arena, it is also appearing in the context of internal law firm data —  documents, email, and other data objects, including voice and video —  with repositories in one larger firm exceeding 50 million items just for documents and selectively retained email records. How will law firms deal with the increasing growth of law firm internal big data? And how will they do so with the increasing demand for a personal approach in the use of computers and information by lawyers and law firm staff as we enter the era of personalization?

Law firm technology is a fairly recent phenomenon. Even our ancient history only goes back about 20 years — if you exclude purely back-office functions — and lawyers actively using computers is a late ’90s event. Pre- and post-Y2K our efforts were focused on installing IT, getting – read,  "forcing" — people to become comfortable with computers and the mouse, and working hard to keep the IT train from crashing. We were in an era of implementation and stabilization. During this time IT becamed embedded within law firms, often as a necessarly evil.