Web-Based Applications

Recently, there have been many interesting articles about the proiferation of web-based hosted applications for common, everyday use. There are many players in the market of providing on-line spreadsheets, work processors and presentation software. It will be interesting to see how this trend plays out in the world of managing legal and litigation data -- in a world where we all do on-line banking, manage our portfolios on-line, send emails using services like YAHOO, GOOGLE and others and where we soon might be creating all of our documents online and watching television online -- how soon will it be before we move more and more legal case management and document management applications out of technologies which require local installations, powerful PC hardware and a robust law firm intranet network (which is often a huge constraint to providing cross-office access to litigation data in multioffice law firms) into technologies which are common, hosted solution accessing in a secure and encrypted manner using the same internet backbone we use (or will soon use) for these other common, day-to-day activities.