It is the week of ABA TECHSHOW and a good way to get warmed up is to check out the TECHSHOW edition of Law Practice Magazine.

The cover story is A Golden Age of Legal Tech Start-Ups by Bob Ambrogi. Other features cover topics from legal incubators to e-signatures. Columns include my observations on Managing the Robots, Tom Mighell on the Battle of the Workplace Messaging Apps, Pete Roberts on A 'Periodic Table' of Law Firm Profitability for Small Firms and Sharon Nelson and John W. Simek on Securing Your Law Firm's Website: A Critical Cybersecurity Task.

If you think managing all of the lawyers and staff in a law firm is a challenge, just wait for that day (coming sooner than you think) when you also have to manage the robots working for your law firm. Despite the cool graphic the magazine production team found to illustrate Managing the Robots, I don’t think we are likely to see humanoid robots in law firms anytime soon. But I do think we are about to see more and more automated processes powered by smart technology systems. This brings up many challenges for firms that are used to supervising people as opposed to perfecting and managing automated processes.

Which partner or partners try to lay claim to the machine-generated profits will just be the first (and loudest) of these issues.

I hope to see you at ABA TECHSHOW this week.