[speculation from the end of this post]
Maybe it's not so much an issue of being comfortable with new technologies. From my experience law firms are embedded very deeply with sophisticated technologies when it comes to document management and knowledge management. Maybe the issue is the mindset, Australian law firms are comfortable with technologies facilitating command & control, and are uncomfortable with the 2.0 technologies which tend to undermine command & control. I can guess that law firms might be very interested in the Semantic web – would it be possible to jump from 1.0 directly to 3.0? What would an organization look like if it deliberately skipped 2.0? Would it even be possible?