Conferences / Symposia, Technology

This Is Why You Absolutely Have To Get On Your Firm's Tech Committee

Demand a seat at the technology table. Your profession relies on it.

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It’s easy to think the only thing you have to do to get ahead is “be a lawyer.” Nose buried in deposition outlines and term sheets and billing like crazy. Unfortunately, that’s just not going to cut it any more. Because you don’t work for a Victorian-era law firm, you work for a thoroughly modern, 21st-century company that just happens to be a law firm. Your bosses may still fancy their little firm a throwback, but if you want to lead the firm some day you’ll have to come to grips with the times.

So you really need to sign up for whatever tech committee your law firm offers. While a lot of organizations are bringing on dedicated information technology specialists to relieve the senior partners of having to keep up with every twist and turn, there’s still an important place at the technology table for a young (or even not so young) lawyer. Decisions aren’t really made at the top, they’re approved at the top. As the lawyer who has to actually use the products out there, it behooves you to be part of the team that makes the decisions that get reported up the chain.

But more importantly, you want on that committee so you can get a trip out to ILTACON. The behemoth annual convention of the International Legal Technology Association, held this year at the Mandalay Bay in Vegas, brings together tech innovators and the tech staff from firms and corporate legal departments to discuss the future of the legal profession and to learn from each other’s experiences. Because while cybersecurity and efficiency may be the overarching themes of the conference, sometimes the best takeaway is just hearing from someone at another firm about their disastrous last migration and figuring out how to avoid it.

Yesterday, the Cowen Group allowed me to sit with a number of firm and in-house technology gurus as they identified their biggest hopes and complaints about technology. One comment that stuck out was:

“You can build a fantastic tool but if there’s no one at the firm to use it…”

That’s where lawyers need to take an active role in backing up the technology staff. The vendors need your insights to build the product you need and your staff needs attorney buy-in back home. Don’t farm that work out to others, be in the room and work with everyone to make it happen.

Another conversation I eavesdropped on compared a massive tech overhaul as “mostly a PR job” because technology is easy… it’s user buy-in that’s hard. Help them out by being the engaged attorney who can sell your colleagues on the new products you worked with the staff to adopt.

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The future of lawyering is coming at you fast and if firms aren’t staying on top of it, they’ll be left behind. As Cowen noted, sometimes our old jokes about the profession work against us:

Stop saying legal is slow to change … stop saying that because 20 percent of the market is moving at a lightning pace. You may not wake up feeling that every day but there are other organizations investing millions in people, process and technology.

It’s also not a bad idea to stop thinking of legal technology solutions as tools to help lawyers and start thinking of them as the practice of law itself. A surgeon isn’t a master of surgery as much as a master of the scalpel. Without that expertise with a tool, a surgeon is nothing. Clients are going to look to lawyers to have that sort of mastery too.

Some lawyers may not see the urgency. However, at the end of the day, the market is going to make these decisions your problem sooner rather than later:

A lot of law firms are about to have a crisis of demographics — a whole generation of senior leaders are about to retire, and with clients mobile as they’ve never been before, and a younger generation of GCs who are going to ask for service delivery in ways firms haven’t dealt with before…

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It’s only going to get more difficult out there. Start working directly with your staff and get yourself out to these conferences. Your firm depends on you.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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