Law Students

Moved to eBay?

I have a good friend who is a CIO within a commercial real estate firm and we had a recent conversation about retail space. The anecdotal information he gets from brokers is that this downturn is different from others in the past. Retailers always have gone through boom and bust cycles. Some disappear and others are ready to take their place at the start of the next cycle. The retail space therefore remains utilized.

This time may be different. Some large number of retailers may simply disappear never to be replaced in the bricks and mortar world, they may simply go virtual. This is really nothing new. Lawyers have been going virtual for quite some time now and a new legal venture recently launched with just that premise. However, what may be new is the magnitude of the shift to virtual. The real Internet revolution has yet to occur. It is no longer about technology but rather about how the use  of enabling technologies will continue to transform industry after industry.

Many of us have been writing about these changes for quite some time and indeed the signs are everywhere that this shift is well underway (e.g. print publishing, education). However, these examples are the obvious ones. What is not so obvious are the changes that will emerge once we are past the "tipping point" and achieve a critical mass across a number of industries?

The current economic downturn is likely to be the accelerator of the inevitable....

Full post as published by LawTechTV on January 08, 2009 (boomark / email).