Top US law firms are moving towards a 'matter-centric' view of technology that enables lawyers to access documents across different systems to improve the efficiency of their IT, a technology survey has revealed.

American Lawyer magazine's tenth annual Tech Survey showed that over the past year firms have continued to seek tools that work across different platforms and allow lawyers to unify their needs and habits as much as possible.


The survey of 146 of the top 200 US firms also highlighted the continuing trend towards increased use of wireless networks and WiFi-equipped conference rooms that allow Internet access to lawyers during meetings and to clients visiting the firm.


The number of firms without them fell from 38% to 17%, with security the top concern for those firms that had not yet installed wireless networks.


Outside the office, 87% of firms provided wireless e-mail units to their lawyers, up 11% on the previous year; the Blackberry was the most popular product, chosen by 89%.


Firms were found to be giving more clients access to secure Web sites and 73% said they exposed portions of working document collections to clients.


Some 63% of respondents said their operating IT budgets had increased in 2005, compared with 54% in 2004, while 59% reported their capital budgets had increased over the period as well, a slight increase on the year before. Firms reported an average operating budget of $9.9 million (£5.6 million) and a $3.6 million capital budget.


Meanwhile, the number of firms with a disaster recovery plan in place rose from 82% to 90%, with 81% saying their plan had been updated in the past year.


Derek Southall, partner and head of strategic development at Wragge & Co in Birmingham, said: 'There is a big push in the whole market to move to aggregate all the different systems used by lawyers - finance information, case documents and so on - to pull together all the IT and make it easier for people to access.'


He said there was a similar emphasis in the UK on disaster recovery, owing to greater insistence from insurers, the rise in awareness after global disasters, and increased compliance requirements. But he doubted whether many firms in either the UK or the US had actually tested their plans to see if they are effective.


He added: 'Over the last ten years, the two technology developments that have made the most difference to lawyers are e-mail and Blackberrys - they have completely changed the way people work.'