Small Law Firms, Solo Practitioners, Technology

Why Isn't Legal Technology Revolutionary?

Legal tech is not supposed to be revolutionary, according to columnist Jeff Bennion.

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revolution revolutionaryJust about every email or product release I read about legal technology says that it is “dynamic” or “revolutionary.” Most of the time it’s not.

Let’s look at last week in the non-legal technology world. Elon Musk released the solar roof panels. This is, of course, in his spare time between building a spaceship to colonize Mars and electric cars that are not horrible. Microsoft had a product release where article after article after article called Microsoft more innovative than Apple.

So, what’s going on in the legal tech world? Why don’t we ever hear about revolutionary things happening in the legal tech world? It’s because legal tech is not supposed to be revolutionary. It’s not supposed to take you to Mars or power your house or eliminate the reliance on fossil fuels. That’s because legal tech is supposed to help you be revolutionary.

Legal Tech Does Exactly What It Needs to Do

As I wrote last week, we are asking ourselves the wrong questions when it comes to legal technology. More than anything, legal tech is a set of tools that helps us work more efficiently so that we can focus on the things the practice management software cannot – be great lawyers.

I just got back from Above the Law’s second Academy for Private Practice in Philadelphia. The Academy for Private Practice is an all-day event that focuses on helping lawyers run a private practice more efficiently. There were a lot of legal tech vendors there. There was an “Innovation Award” showcase for legal technology companies to showcase what they’ve got. The winner was Casetext, which built a tool where you drag and drop your brief into their legal research tool and it analyzes the authorities you cite and directs you to cases and other authorities that you might have missed by comparing your brief with a database of most-cited authorities. That is a legitimately neat tool that can not only save you hours of research on each project, but help you find things that you would not have been able to find before. It makes your solo practice into the strength of maybe a solo attorney and a law clerk. Is it revolutionary to give attorneys shortcuts to perform legal research faster and better? Probably not when you compare it to Mars spaceships, but it’s not supposed to be.

I get regular newsletters and listserve announcements about attorneys winning big verdicts and truly doing revolutionary things for their clients. They do it with the help of tools. Go to a really good opening or closing. There’s going to be some kind of technology helping them tell that story. The PowerPoint slide deck isn’t revolutionary, but it’s the tool that helps lawyers engage with jurors using cognitive science principles of learning and visual design to better capitalize on the attorney’s training in crafting an opening statement or closing argument to deliver phenomenal, life-changing, revolutionary verdicts.

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Other tools, especially practice management tools, help with that as well. Fellow ATL columnist Bob Ambrogi gave a great presentation on choosing the right practice management platform. There are several to choose from, and although they all share some core functionality, they offer different solutions to different practice areas and practice types. When I was working in a small law firm with eight attorneys, we would still get outmanned by smaller firms that simply were able to operate more efficiently, which meant their two people could do the work of three or four.

So is it revolutionary to have a better system for Bates labeling documents or indexing documents stored on the cloud? No, that’s your job. Technology is there to help you do it, though.

Jeff Bennion is a solo practitioner at the Law Office of Jeff Bennion. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of San Diego’s plaintiffs’ trial lawyers association, Consumer Attorneys of San Diego. He is also the Education Chair and Executive Committee member of the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section. He is a member of the Advisory Council and instructor at UCSD’s Litigation Technology Management program. His opinions are his own. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at jeff@trial.technology.

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