This week at their annual, now virtual, Clio Cloud Conference, Clio released its 2020 Legal Trends Report, revealing an unprecedented rate of technology adoption in the legal industry during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The findings show that firms embracing cloud-based and client-centered legal technologies are projected to collect nearly $40,000 more this year, per lawyer, than those slow to adopt technology.
“The technological transformation of the legal industry that we expected to take place over the next five to ten years is now being compressed into weeks and months due to the pandemic,” said Jack Newton, CEO and Co-founder of Clio.
“More than ever, lawyers realize that technology is a powerful differentiator in building a better normal going forward and legal professionals who had hesitated to adopt technology in the past were suddenly forced to rapidly adapt to this new reality.”
Included in the report was an analysis of data from tens of thousands of legal professionals comparing revenue earnings of firms using multiple cloud-based, client-centered solutions that are part of the Clio platform. The analysis showed that firms using electronic payments, client portals, and client intake and CRM solutions collected nearly $20,000 more per lawyer in 2019.
In 2020, firms using these solutions are projected to collect nearly $40,000 more, indicating that these technologies have significantly mitigated the impact of the pandemic on these firms and is accelerating their recovery.
Survey data also showed that physical, in-person legal services are far from the default for law firms with 79% of law firms relying on cloud technology to store firm data, and 83% meeting with clients virtually.
The shift to virtual, cloud-based legal services may already be well underway. Seven percent of legal professionals said that they had let go of their commercial office space after the start of the pandemic, and 12% are unsure if they will keep their commercial office space in the future.
Now in its fifth year, the 2020 report includes Clio’s real-time analysis on the impacts of COVID-19 on the legal industry from March to August encapsulating: anonymized and aggregated responses from 150,000 legal professionals using Clio over the last two years, as well as, survey responses from 1,000 legal professionals and 1,000 general consumers in the U.S on what they deem most important to them today and in a post-COVID world.
Access a full copy of the 2020 report at clio.com/ltr.