“But lawyers know nothing about tech ”
decoded.legal
decoded.legal
Remember that software like WordPerfect which was very much not WYSIWYG had a long life with certain audiences like attorneys because they were used to it.
If it really is a billable hour problem the auto mechanic industry has already solved it: standard hours. Various services are documented at a given number of hours which is what you get billed by most shops even if it takes the mechanic half the time.
For instance, discovery is a lot more complex than doing a standard operation on a car and the variance in hours worked depends heavily on specific details of the case which lends itself very poorly to charging a standardized price for discovery.
I actually mentioned to my last lawyer that there is established and well used technology that can show changes between documents. She seemed uninterested and a couple of days later I had to email her about a clause that got dropped in one of the Word doc email tornados the day before.
I see no mention of any kind of version control in this article. It seems crazy to me but I guess that would drive down billable hours.
Ultimately, a tool like Juro would be pretty cool, but if you're the guy trying to get the contract done you're not going to introduce a new thing to the workflow. Everyone will object.
While negotiating over a contract, seeing the changes is very useful. It's very common. Talk to someone who is in procurement or who is in sales.
(Disclaimer: IANAL, most of my "knowledge" about the legal profession comes from the TV show Suits.)
Pretty much everyone uses track changes in Word, though. And if not they should.
(FWIW, I think embedding Git support in MS Office would do a lot towards VCS adoption outside of tech.)
Interesting observation over the last few weeks of playing with OpenDocument is that the revision control feature works by creating new local style for every change, which creates total havoc when you try to diff the .fodt or content.xml by external tools.
There are some firms that understand the value of efficiency (especially those that do fixed-fee or value-based billing), but most of the largest firms aren't especially interested in increasing efficiency.
I call BS on this. Doing more in less time means you can do even more than before and kill your competition.
There is nothing but upside in advancing technologically for pretty much every industry.
There are a few law firms that are heavily automated. But they are mostly larger, class action, pay per result, type law firms vs your standard law firm.
If the firm can handle clients in 1/2 the time, they can take on more clients. They don't have to advertise themselves as being "better" or something.
Payroll, for all businesses, is a huge limiting factor on abilities. Which means, you can't just "staff up" and become larger overnight.
Not to mention, you might not require a small army of paralegals and secretaries anymore... fewer staff can get the same load accomplished.
It even opens the door to charging flat-rates for certain services, instead of by the 1/10th hour or whatever.
The point is, doing more in less time is always better... even if you decide to kick back and relax with your newfound time.
And while they could hypothetically get more clients, this aspect of the business is based on relationships (and is a burden for senior partners). Partners know that if associates are more efficient, there's a chance they would lose money, and a chance they could win more new clients and add those in too. But at the end of the day, that just puts them roughly where they were before — with fully-occupied associates, and a book of business that is the same size. For partners, it's all risk and no reward.
I repeat - there is zero downside to modernizing and using tech for any business.
You have to adapt and figure it out... before your competition does. Perhaps that means changing your billing model or something - whatever, figure it out.
All of this "no automation - no technology" chanting is wild to see.
Majority of what a law firm does is low skill or no skill. Copying documents, looking up case law and citations, filling in documents from templates, etc. None of this requires highly skilled labor, and a lot of it can be automated or made easier for fewer people to accomplish the same output.
• description of task
• time spent on task (in 6 min increments)
• name of person who did the task
• billing rate of said person
• total cost for the task
Unless a firm that "fires half its staff" also doubles its billing rate, it will not make more money. And good luck to the firm that tries to double its billing rate. It is very difficult to convince clients that you're worth that much (or that you should be getting all the benefit from advances in technology).
I'm not saying firms shouldn't make changes, I'm saying they really don't want to. Eventually they will, just like they eventually got rid of typing pools. But it took much longer than it would have if the incentive structure in firms were different. They are married to the billable hour.
Filling out standard documents and such can (and often is) charged by the job. Some common case types even are billed by the job, instead of hourly.
Majority of firms do not handle complex cases that require deep knowledge and skill. We can compare this to accounting automation, such as Intuit/Quickbooks. Are they for every business? No - but for a ton of standard businesses they are a perfect fit, and Intuit makes a ton of money in the process.
This resistance to modernizing will kill some firms in the process.
So many standard things are handled with flat rates these days. You're not the first one needing to incorporate, or respond to an ADA complaint, etc. These are cookie-cutter things, and can be handled very quickly by the firm.
So - accordingly - they charge a flat rate. You don't get a choice usually.
Very few firms handle complex, specialized issues that require unknown amounts of time. Rate billing is for those situations.
No client is demanding to be billed every 6 minutes, having no idea what the ordeal's cost will amount to. That is compelled by the firm, because of the unknowns involved.
Law firms with better reputation can and do charge more per billable hour. Presumably, results factor in to that, so anything that produces better results for the same effort should, over time, increase the $/hour rate. (Or, if only relative and not absolute performance matters, missing out on an improvement adopted by other firms will drop the sustainable $/hr rate.)
Also, not all lawyers are employed in law firms, and many are employed in places where their time is cost not revenue.
That got shaken up with the arrival of knowledge management systems; law firms led that charge.
Most politicians are lawyers; and most politicians are tech-ignorant. That sustains the myth.
And these were City firms, working for big corporations. High Street lawyers were way behind.
I was never involved with the accounting departments of law firms; but obviously, that's clerical work, from the point of view of a lawyer.
<chuckle> Read the article, seems reasonable.
Connect with Neil on LinkedIn -> 404 page.
All righty then.
(edited for missing word!)
Alternatively, arguably better: Keep a master domain for each identity and update social media accounts for that identity on a page in the master domain.
That said, I thought exactly the same reading the article. If he thinks he's already one of the more tech savvy ones, that only proves the point of the article he's criticizing.
This is a rare but wonderful point of view, particularly among non-technical-field professionals.
Lawyers only drag their customers up into a constructed reality. They're paid to solve problems in lawspace, not in the real world.
Crime, family law, wills, industrial espionage, bankruptcy, insurance disputes, personal injury…
Shame there aren't any lawyers who help folks out with the real world situations.
I created software to expedite discovery analysis of labor disputes, and when pitching it to lawyers I was literally told “you’re saying you created something that will take milliseconds to do what would take me weeks? Why would I want that? I get paid by the hour.”
The clear thrust of the article Neil is critiquing, right at the top:
- "A study of attitudes to lawtech carried out by The University of Manchester, University College London and the Law Society finds that a lack of understanding by, and encouragement from, senior managers is proving a barrier to the uptake of technologies such as artificial intelligence."
Neil's framing:
- "Pretty much every day, I read something to the effect of 'lawyers are clueless when it comes to tech lol' ... sigh"
From the article:
- "less than a third (32%) use even basic lawtech, such as legal databases and contract review software."
From Neil:
- What on earth is "lawtech"?
From the article:
- "'The legal profession is at a crossroads, with new technologies that promise to transform virtually every aspect of the legal services sector starting to gather pace,' she said. 'However, our report suggests that this transformation might not be as rapid as some would think. It is clear that there is a business case for adopting lawtech, but people are not necessarily equating this to how it will benefit them personallySenior managers and leaders within law firms need to think about creating a clear connection between the benefits to the organisation and the benefits to the individual, if they want to get the buy-in they need from their professional colleagues.'"
There are some lawyers that get tech, but many more have only a very surface level understanding, if that. Especially the “senior managers” the article is directed towards. I understand this article is directed at the UK, but my favorite example of this is SCOTUS justices learning that text messages are routed through, and stored on, intermediary servers. Chief Justice John Roberts, during oral argument in Ontario v. Quon (https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...): “I thought, you know, you push a button; it goes right to the other thing” followed by Justice Scalia: “You mean it doesn't go right to the other thing?”
1. I know a lawyer who did comp sci at Stanford before doing his law degree at either Yale or Harvard I forget which. He was very knowledgeable about all the licensing, IP protection issues etc relevant to software.
2. I work regularly with an ex-dev who is now a lawyer who specializing in infosec and data privacy issues. He runs packet captures on sites and checks for unintentional data leakage/gdpr violations when sites somewhere call out to google tag manager or put 3rd-party trackers somewhere. In an enterprise context there are a bajillion places this can happen so it's great to have a lawyer who understands what's ok and not but also is technical enough to use curl against a rest api or can run (and understand) packet captures when different web actions occur.