It is one of the most exciting weeks of the year for many legal technology experts. It is the week of ABA TECHSHOW.   ABA TECHSHOW is many things. I’d encourage practicing lawyers to attend at least once. Among these many things is that it is a gathering of some really smart people working as, or with, lawyers.

One of the greatest honors of my professional career was being asked by the 2012 ABA TECHSHOW Board, under the leadership of then-chair Reid Trautz, to give a keynote plenary session on the future of law. I was honored but nervous because the audience included my peers, my friends and as noted, many really smart people. You can read the ABA Journal’s coverage of that talk, titled The Future of Law: Dark Clouds or Silver Linings?

In January 2018, I wrote a column for the Oklahoma Bar Journal titled The Future of Law. The 2012 talk was intended to be very broad and give lessons to all lawyers about how to succeed in the future. The 2018 column was focused on several recent trends and how they were going to impact the practice of law. I thought regular readers might appreciate the opportunity to compare my 2012 predictions with my 2018 predictions. To me, the most interesting thing was how many things I mentioned in the 2018 column that either didn’t exist or existed only in laboratories and theory in 2012.