By Joanna Goodman11 January 2021 Cloud technology was already transforming legal services and making courts more efficient before the pandemic hit. 2021 will present new challenges to a remote workforce Traditionally, this is the time when people make predictions for the year ahead – but in 2021 predictions seem somewhat hollow. Nobody anticipated 2020’s global pandemic, although it has been flagged up as a possibility multiple times in recent decades. In fiction, Nigel Watts’ 1995 novel Twenty Twenty is set in 2020 during a pandemic (Watts died in 1999, so did not witness the accuracy of his dystopian vision). ‘If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war,’ said Bill Gates in his 2015 TED talk, ‘The next outbreak? We’re not ready’, which was inspired by West Africa’s Ebola virus epidemic. However, I cannot find mention of a likely pandemic in predictions for 2020.