When it comes to technology, I’ve heard it said that most lawyers are Luddites. In case you’re not familiar with the term, here’s a brief description of Luddites from Wikipedia.com:
The Luddites were a social movement of 19th-century English textile artisans who protested – often by destroying mechanized looms – against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt were leaving them without work and changing their way of life.
If you look at surveys of law firms and their adoption of new technology and marketing methods, such as social media, you’ll see that a good argument can be made that most lawyers are in fact Luddites.
I’ve also heard it said that most lawyers can also be called laggards when it comes to both technology and marketing. The term “laggards” comes from the technology adoption lifecycle, which is a sociological model devised by professors at Iowa State University. The professors devised the model to predict how fast farmers would convert from using regular corn to hybrid corn. But the model is most frequently used to refer to the way consumers adopt new technologies. [Read more...]
