Legal Technology Journal

Just under ten years ago I began writing my book Legal Practice in the Digital Age (it was subsequently published in 1998), which contained the then radical – if not downright heretical – idea that law firms had spent the previous quarter of a century investing in inward-looking back-office administration systems, when what they should have been doing is spending that money on client-facing systems that would improve or at least enhance the delivery of legal services to their clients. In other words, instead of building ever more complex billing systems, they should have been trying to create the legal world equivalent of the bank ATM.

A decade on and what do we see? Well, the technology is now here – or at least lawyers no longer try to pretend their clients never use extranets and prefer to wait for pieces of paper, in envelopes with postage stamps on them, to arrive at their offices rather than handle a whole exchange in a matter of minutes using e-mail and instant messaging. But, from the complaints – and general failure to be impressed by law firm IT initiatives – I hear from in-house lawyers and corporate counsel, I’m left with the feeling that when it comes to IT, many firms are still just going through the motions rather than wholeheartedly exploiting the potential of technology.

If a client nags them enough they will do something; otherwise, left to their own devices, lawyers will just keep on working in the same old ways they have done. Why? Probably because they still do not view technology as a strategic tool. The attitude in many firms is still ‘what will technology do for us?’ – meaning the partners – whereas it should be ‘what will technology do for the firm and its clients?’.

This was recently highlighted in one of its more extreme forms by the firm that decided not to implement a digital dictation system ‘because the only people who’d benefit from it would be the secretaries’. Well, yes, but there are enough RoI case studies in the public domain now to show that if a DDS can help secretaries work more efficiently, this can help both reduce total secretarial overheads – in other words, improve profitability, which is good for partners – and improve document turnaround times, which means a better service for the clients.

Perhaps the real problem is that the scope of technology has now expanded to a point that increasing numbers of partners no longer have the management vision to keep up with its potential, and that leaving them in charge of IT is like giving razorblades to monkeys.

Charles Christian