I offer just this one prediction for 2007, as I believe it will eclipse all others.

With Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 released and other big internet companies upgrading key information management products, 2007 will see RSS reading reach a mass audience and the potential for RSS to transform the information management industry will be realised.

There is already no shortage of useful RSS feeds for lawyers, and if the smallest of local councils can produce several, so can everyone else that matters. Spurred by the increased demand, they will.

But once again, lawyers will be some of the last to cotton on. As Richard Susskind said recently in his Times column:

Most lawyers are pathologically late adopters of IT. Despite promising, early successes, until the worth of an emerging technology is proven beyond reasonable doubt it will not generally be embraced by the legal world. A case in point is RSS [which] enables law firms to alert their clients when they publish something new online, and allows practitioners themselves to be similarly notified when websites relevant for them are updated. While this appears to be ideal for lawyers, many have not heard of RSS. … within 18 months, any lawyer not using RSS will be badly out of step.