Our mission is to bring you the latest on legal technology issues—electronic discovery, compliance systems, litigation support, case and claim management, deal rooms and document assembly. Add to that, mobile and remote computing, web-based collaboration systems, extranets, document management and … well, you get the picture. We aim to cover the entire legal technology waterfront.

In the bargain, we hope to chronicle how advances in technology are enabling new and better ways to practice law. Those of us who have been watching this space for awhile are amazed at the changes so far. Email, Blackberries, digital signatures, web-based litigation review, click-through agreements, electronic due diligence and collaboration. Wikis, mashups, RSS, Google docs and spreadsheets. How much of this was on your radar screen a decade ago? Not much? You aren’t alone.

But, as Yogi Berra might say, “We ain’t seen nothing yet.” Changes on the horizon will make the last decade look tame. Broadband to home and office means unprecedented access to content on demand. It also means virtual transparency—you can learn just about anything about anybody. Mobil devices and wireless mean you are connected and can communicate anytime, from anywhere. It also means there is a record of your communications floating out there for somebody to find. Whether you like it or not.

Sarbanes Oxley put compliance on everyone’s agenda. The new amendments to the Federal Rules elevated electronic discovery to a similar status. These requirements, and others, come at a time when we are creating unparalleled amounts of content. Millions—strike that—billions of emails a day. By some estimates we are generating over 600 exabytes a year of electronic content. How much is that? Oh, about 8 million Libraries of Congress a year. And most of it is discoverable.

Our audience includes the whole of the legal community. To be sure, we write for lawyers who are in the trenches practicing law. But we also write for legal assistants, legal administrators and the host of other legal professionals involved in the delivery of legal services, together with the IT professionals who support them.

This also includes corporate legal and insurance. In-house lawyers face unique challenges that technology can help solve, like contract management, records retention, regulatory compliance, IP portfolio management, risk management, . . . . And insurance companies handle thousands of claims and cases. The legal technology issues we write about are as important to them as to their law firms.

This is especially true for document management. Corporations bear the cost of inefficient approaches to litigation and other legal matters. They are now hiring litigation support professionals to manage the collection and review of discovery documents as they attempt to deal with the new demands around electronic discovery. Likewise, they are creating central document repositories and hiring national court reporting companies in an effort to cut costs and increase efficiency. And, they are requiring outside counsel to work together virtually in cyberspace.

This venture brings together a board of legal technology professionals with unprecedented credentials. Most have been writing about legal technology for decades—some for longer than they care to remember. We also seek out writers from all aspects of the profession to share their experiences and talk about technology issues that impact the legal profession both now and in the future. These are people who have been there, who know what they are talking about and can speak to us in plain English.

Ultimately, we strive to provide an independent voice on technology issues for all parts of the legal community—one not driven by a particular vendor or bias. Rather, like the American Bar Association from which we come, we hope to offer straight talk on technology issues that is beholden to no one.

Please join us as readers, as writers and as fellow travelers in this rapidly evolving world of legal technology. We promise it will be a thoughtful and exciting journey.

John Tredennick