Are Lawyers Forced To Evolve?

Lawyering will always be lawyering, but the business of lawyering will depend more and more on integrating technology into your office.

A few months ago, I was in a deposition and the court reporter asked the other attorney if he wanted a live feed on an iPad. The other attorney, who was much older than me, made some joke about how he can barely figure out how to check his e-mail on his Blackberry and doesn’t even know what a live feed is. As he made this joke, he looked at me and grinned as if I were supposed to agree with him that all this technology is just crazy and constantly bombarding us and getting in the way of us doing real lawyer things. He was almost proud of the fact that he has less of an understanding of how an iPad works than most second graders.

The reason I bring up this story is because it’s an attitude that I see a lot, especially in law offices. “Document management system? Why can’t we just put things in filing cabinets alphabetically?” “E-mail retention policies? Who needs that?” “You want to highlight, redact, and Bates stamp documents in Adobe Acrobat? Just use a pen, correction tape, and printer labels.” “We are a law firm, dammit, not some hipster startup company!”

Attorneys Need to See the Bigger Picture

The problem with that line of thinking is that a law practice, whether it’s big or small, is a business. Businesses need to adapt and evolve, even those that are based on steadfast principles, like law firms. One steadfast principle is that whether someone wins a motion is still going to be based on which side has the better, clearer legal argument. It has been like that for centuries and it will be like that in 50 years. No one is saying that that part of the practice of law will go away or change. What I’m saying is that the parts that have changed, and that will continue to change rapidly, are the 1,000 steps that the whole office takes to get to the point where a final brief has been filed and the attorney is allowed to make his or her argument in court. So, lawyering will always be lawyering, but the business of lawyering will depend more and more on integrating technology into your office.

Big or Small, Your Firm Needs to Adapt

I have worked in law firms of all sizes. I know that even in large law firms, whether you are preparing a motion for summary judgment or preparing your case for trial, it is crunch time. Not being able to take advantage of the shortcuts that technology offers can put back any firm of any size. You are not going to have 20 associates draft your legal arguments, and you are not going to have every legal secretary in the office preparing the table of authorities, so it doesn’t matter how big your law firm is. In fact, as I have pointed out before, it is even a bigger problem for large law firms.

In a recent article for the California Bar Journal, Washington and Lee University School of Law professor James Moliterno (who has been quoted on this site before) stated:

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Today, the profession has done little or nothing to adapt to advances in technology and the globalization of the economy.

Conclusion

So does someone really need a real-time feed at a deposition streaming on an iPad? Sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t, but the important thing is being able to know what the benefit of that would be. Taking that one step further, you should know what other technologies exist out there for effective depos, like eDepoze. You should know how to use Acrobat Pro, Microsoft Excel, and other programs to sort and organize your case files. Know what offsite storage is, just in case your law firm’s building is completely damaged in a fire. Soon, lawyers are going to find out the hard way that they are forced to evolve.


Jeff Bennion is a solo practitioner from San Diego. When not handling his own cases, he’s consulting lawyers on how to use technology to not be boring in trial or managing e-discovery projects in mass torts/complex litigation cases. If you want to be disappointed in a lack of posts, you can follow him on Twitter or on Facebook. If you have any ideas of things you want him to cover, email Jeff at jeff@trial.technology.

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