Technology

The Problem With Legal Tech

Before you waste time and money and get frustrated with legal tech, make sure it’s right for you.

By  
on

I write about legal technology on the internet. That means I get contacted a lot by people who want me to write about and review their awesome new product. I also get contacted a lot by lawyer consumers who want to know what is the best new thing out there. I love when I can play matchmaker, but it rarely happens. Because a lot of legal tech sucks. Don’t get me wrong, I run a fairly tech-savvy practice, but I see a lot of garbage and a lot of lawyers making poor buying choices for technology.

Here’s why it happens and also how to find what you need:

Lawyers Have a Lot of Money

As a whole, lawyers are a good target audience because they have a lot of money. Running a law practice is expensive — you have phone lines, receptionists, paralegals, legal secretaries, computers, file storage, process servers, copy machines, etc. Lawyers spend a lot of money every month to keep their doors open. That makes them a prime target to pitch tools to work more efficiently and save money by replacing or upgrading anyone of those things with automated doc review tools, cloud fax machines. Those are helpful tools, but it also makes them a target for the garbage too.

Lawyers Are Afraid

A few years ago, California came out with an ethics opinion about e-discovery. It mentioned how lawyers who are dealing with e-discovery need to either become familiar with it, hire someone who is familiar with it, or abandon the case. So, it’s the same rule of law for lawyers involved in any area of law they are unfamiliar with. The only difference is that e-discovery can creep into a case fairly easily mid-litigation. When this opinion came out, vendors jumped on the opportunity to proclaim that the State Bar now mandates that attorneys hire them or face ethics charges, and I’m sure many attorneys did hire them. Attorneys are quick to admit they are in over their heads in technology issues and quick to scare. A scared customer is a great customer.

Does It Solve a Problem?

Sponsored

Do you remember the Eggstractor? It was an as-seen-on-TV product that helped people peel hard boiled eggs faster. The science behind it was dubious, but more importantly, so was the purpose. How many households are eating so many hard boiled eggs that they are suffering from mass amounts of lost time peeling all of those eggs? But, it was really popular for a time and people decided they needed to at least try the Eggstractor and the joke was on them.

I think a lot of legal technology is like the Eggstractor. Someone had me demo a product for them that integrated with Outlook and it let you read your emails, but it also had a tab where you could access your documents, because I guess it’s faster to do that than have Outlook open and also a separate window with your files. One time, someone showed me a 150-slide PowerPoint deck about this new product they have that lets you open up legal contracts and find and replace terms in contracts, so it was like Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat (yes, you can edit scanned documents in Acrobat), only just for legal contracts I guess.

There Are Some Fantastic Products Out There

Here’s how you find legal tech for your office. Take an inventory of what you are wasting time on. What are times you’ve almost missed deadlines or spent way too much time on something? Was there something other than a busy caseload that kept you from working efficiently? Was there a way you wish you could have done something faster? You’re probably not alone and someone might have created a solution for that already. Remember technology is just a tool to help you work faster and more efficiently, like a wheel or a pulley or a wrench.

Integrate technology slowly. Remember that there is going to be a learning curve and you are going to lose time learning how to adopt the new technology and troubleshoot issues to get it rolling. Don’t try to roll out too many things at once, or you are going to lock up your productivity in troubleshooting. Just because something saves time, doesn’t mean it’s going to save you time in the long run. For example, let’s transport to a fictional dimension where the Eggstractor works perfectly every time and does in fact peel an egg ten times faster than by hand. If I eat one boiled egg a month, I’m wasting more time fussing with the Eggstractor than I would if I just did it the old fashion way. Likewise, if you have a tool that fills in court forms, but you do business formations and don’t need to file a lot of court forms, you might be wasting your time going with the fancier tool.

Sponsored

Before you waste time and money and get frustrated with legal tech, make sure it’s right for you.

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.

CRM Banner

Topics

, , ,