Over the past few months, I have written several articles about how administrative professionals in the legal industry deserve more respect. The legal profession can only operate with the help of numerous nonlawyers, and the contributions of these professionals is often overlooked. I recently received an insightful email from an information technology professional at a law firm, and the exchange made me remember how grateful I was for all of the IT professionals I interacted with throughout my career. IT professionals definitely deserve more respect in the legal industry for a number of reasons.
The first time I encountered IT professionals was when I was a summer associate at a Biglaw firm. Summer associates need to be trained on a variety of law firm technologies quickly, and since they only have eight to 10 weeks at a firm to make an impression, they need to hit the ground running when they start their positions. Fortunately, the IT professional at the firm was extremely helpful to me and my colleagues. This person ensured that I was up to speed with how to use a BlackBerry, which was pretty clutch since I had no prior experience using this device. In addition, this person also ran the office lottery pool, which was an added service she contributed to our firm.
As I moved throughout my career, I encountered IT professionals at every firm at which I worked. One of the firms outsourced some of its IT work to a vendor and had professionals in the office to handle immediate concerns. Another one of the smaller firms I worked at had one dedicated IT professional that kept our firm’s servers running and answered any technical questions. Even my own practice right now, which comprises my partner/brother and me has an IT person we can call if something technical needs to be addressed.
IT professionals deserve more respect since they often operate in stressful environments when things need to be addressed immediately. Usually, IT professionals operate in the background and passively ensure that the firm’s technology is running smoothly. However, when there is a software outage or another issue, IT professionals need to swoop in and try their best to save the day.
One time, I worked at a firm that had all of its time entries deleted for an entire month due to some glitch in the system. This was a huge issue since people would need to spend an incredible amount of time reconstructing their time entries if the IT people did not find this data. Our firm eventually had to reconstruct most of the time entries, but I had a lot of respect for the IT professionals who had to deal with angry lawyers struggling to understanding why their time entries had been deleted.
IT professionals also deserve more respect since they can make an attorney’s life much easier. Any time that an attorney needs to contend with a technology issue is time that cannot be spent on billing. When systems go down, attorneys cannot perform work, and the firm loses money. As a result, IT professionals are critical to the money-making drive of law firms since they help lawyers stay efficient and engaged in client work for as much time as possible.
Moreover, IT professionals can also help lawyers be more effective at their jobs. IT professionals can often empower lawyers to use technology to take less time to do chores that are not billable, or to have more ease and confidence when performing billable tasks for clients. For instance, I was once working at a law firm with a solid IT department, and one of the IT professionals walked by my office and saw me scrunched in my chair squinting at my computer screen. He suggested that I use a long and skinny computer screen for certain tasks, and he helped me set up this device. It might sound crazy, but that monitor was a game-changer for me and made it so much easier to review documents and make edits to papers. This is just one of the small ways how IT professionals can empower attorneys to do better work.
Despite all of the good work they do, attorneys do not always respect IT professionals or even treat them well. Whenever there is a technological outage, IT professionals oftentimes get the wrath of firm management, and sometimes, it might be deserved. However, lawyers should definitely realize that IT professionals have an important and difficult job within the legal profession. If IT professionals and attorneys work together, they can help ensure that firms are as profitable as possible but that lawyers can perform their best legal work for clients.
Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.
