Sure, the Annual ILTA Conference is the premier legal tech event on the calendar, but we don't blame you for avoiding the August heat in Central Florida (not near a beach). We sent our rep to seek out knowledge and air conditioning, but with blogging, you don't have to.

Inside Legal Opinions and LexBlog have the rundown of people blogging from the conference. Thanks to these intrepid folks, you can get the latest news and ideas from the conference while sipping your coffee while wearing that comfy, ratty t-shirt in your home office after the kids are in bed.

Via the Legal Blog Watch, some law firms—or at least some web savvy people inside them—are going all Web 2.0. They are creating social networks on Facebook and updating their Wikipedia entries. Some even appear to have succumbed to the temptation to edit the Wikipedia pages of the competition to cast them in an unfavorable light!

While law firms are notoriously conservative when it comes to technology, this is a rather quick adoption rate in an industry that just migrated to Windows XP in the last couple of years. Networking and research seem perfectly logical arenas for firms to try out these new forms of web interaction. So how long will it be before videos go up on YouTube?

We have been booked for a number of speaking engagements in the next few months, and it seems they all want to know about IT trends for law firms. We thought it would be fun to crowdsource our reader’s thoughts on some of the trends we see. This is what we are following:

Server Virtualization (also tied closely with disaster recovery). Virtualization technology has matured and makes real sense for firms of many sizes. Most important, it facilitates disaster recovery and business continuity efforts that many firms are implementing today.

Data-vaulting. The future of back-ups are online. Time to throw away those back-up tapes you forgot to swap anyway.

Managed IT services. Remote monitoring and management of IT for 24/7/365 coverage. Small firms get experience, expertise, and the complete package for maximum value for their IT budget, while larger firms can get preventive measures like daily server checks that would otherwise be neglected.

Online Services. Work is moving to the web. Many applications have already moved online like accounting, IP, and CRM, and more are coming. Meanwhile, newsfeeds (RSS) and search are revolutionizing information like e-mail revolutionized communication.

Outsourcing. The timeless sturm-und-drang of in-house vs. out-source extends to practically every corner of the firm, including litigation support, facilities, and even secretarial.

Paperless. Ah, the holy grail. The paperless office seems closer today than ever, but it means some drastic changes in workflow and a rethinking of your equipment and IT.

Vista/Office 2007. From the meat-and-potatoes department, the shift will eventually happen, although no one seems very excited about it.

Give us your feedback on the comments. How would you expand on our points? What are we missing?

Here is a quick update on where you can find SAGE experts speaking on IT topics of interest to the legal and professional services communities.

A Mighty Outlook and PowerPoint 2007 – September 19, 2007 at Noon: SAGE’s Dave Carns and Tony Buffkin wrap up our three part series on Office 2007 for the Information Services and Technology Section of the ALA Capital Chapter. The focus this time is on the latest version of PowerPoint and whether Outlook 2007 is up to the daunting task of managing our email, information, and contacts.

IT Solutions for Small Law Firms – September 25, 2007 at Noon. The Small Firm Management Section of the ALA Capital Chapter is hosting this event. The question for small firms is always how to do more with less? Outsourcing, web services, and mobility provide exciting opportunities for small firms, letting them act big while still maintaining their agility. We will look at these opportunities in detail while also discussing “bread-and-butter” issues like Windows Vista and Office 2007.

We are also firming up speaking engagements on disaster recovery and other topics in October and beyond.

This great blog essay over at Digging My Own Ditch [via Found|Read] provides a primer on the value of Web 2.0 for people (or “users” if you want). Rather than being caught up in descriptions of RSS, AJAX and other technical aspects, the essay is about what “Web 2.0” dynamics mean for people, and then applies those dynamics to the archetypal IT tool: corporate email.

Here are the three dynamics that define the Web 2.0 experience for people:

• Personal expression – Web 2.0 provides people a greater ability to express their personalities to others
• Efficient connections – Web 2.0 services make meeting new like-minded people more efficient
• Information discovery – Web 2.0 software and services change how people discover information

Information discovery and efficient connections make perfect sense, but how in the world would enabling personal expression improve corporate e-mail? Turns out that as more people join communities online, they are used to posting photos of themselves (or avatars) and expressing their interests, specialities, accomplishments, and more. This aides in creating networks of like-minded people (efficient connections) that make finding information easier (information discovery).

Connections are more efficient because they are self-selected through common interests, which filters information to be more relevant and is thus more valuable. Throw in tagging, social bookmarking, and trackbacks (cross-linking)and people can find information and webs of information in ways better suited to them compared to a taxonomy or literal search engine. Applied to corporate e-mail, contacts are grouped by each person’s personal network, and e-mails are tagged for concepts that the e-mail is about but does not explicitly mention.

So what does Web 2.0 mean to businesses? Better connected employees with better access to the right information.

Here is our Friday installment of what is being said on the Internet that administrators and IT pros at law and professional services firms should know.

Where did my Excel commands go? The transition to Office 2007’s new “fluid interface” is causing some consternation with many who have become accustomed to the keyboard shortcuts and menu commands in Excel 2003. Computerworld published this handy cheat sheet mapping the old locations for commands from Excel 2003 to 2007. For more on what has changed and what is new in Office 2007, check out our free online webinar “Compelling Enhancements in Office 2007” on August 15, 2007 at 2:00 p.m. EDT.

Businesses cautious on Vista upgrade. A new poll says that only 2 percent of businesses are running Vista, and only 9 percent more planning on upgrading in the next three months. Now, we know firms that just went to XP last year, so this wait-and-see attitude doesn’t surprise us. Some reasons cited include old hardware that won’t run Vista and training.

Contracts online, should lawyers be worried? Business 2.0 has an article on a Spanish company putting contracts online to cut out the lawyers. More than that, they are throwing in some value-added with their dashboard that has a timeline of negotiations, comments, and more. Inside Opinions sees the move as complementary rather than completely disruptive.

Census Bureau information to your newsreader. Following up on our post on great government web site mash-ups, Robert Ambrogi points out that the U.S. Census Bureau has RSS feeds and podcasts on a number of statistics like “Aging Population,” “Foreign-born Population,” and more.

For more stories filtered for administrators and IT pros in legal and professional services firms, get our supplemental newsfeed, available here through Google Reader.

Here is a must have for every lawyer and paralegal in your office. The Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit organization for using technology to increase transparency in the U.S. Government, published this list of “insanely useful web sites” [via LXRR] add value to the torrents of government data making it more useful, accessible, or intelligible. These sites gravitate toward the legislative arena, but include:

• a better way to search Thomas and monitor legislation through GovTrack.us;
• DOJ Documents Search (www.trainingdb.com);
• find contractor misconduct;
• searchable database of federal spending and contracting (fedspending.org); and
• search public Congressional Research Service (CRS) documents (www.opencrs.com)

These sites provide extra value through adding newsfeeds (RSS feeds) for updates not just on news, but search queries. So every time new information arrives matching a query you created—even if it was six months ago—you are alerted through a newsfeed. Others like LOUIS search multiple sources, like the Federal Register, GAO Reports, and Presidential documents. Some synthesize data from multiple sources like MapLight.org does for campaign contributions and voting records. GovTrack, which serves as the foundation for many of these sites, allows people to create their own “monitors” for bills, votes, members of Congress, and even subject areas.