Small Law Firms

Though Lacking Gender Diversity, Legal Tech Deserves Kudos For Salvaging Thousands Of Women Lawyers’ Careers

When it comes to helping women practice the profession, legal technology has done a lot.

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Last week, Kristen Sonday of legal tech startup Paladin released a report concluding that women founders are underrepresented in legal technology companies. According to Sonday’s study, women account for just 13.1 percent of legal tech startup founders. And while that number is abysmal, it’s not terribly out of sync with the tech space overall, where only 17 percent of startups have female founders. The study points out that in the tech startup space, women founders receive only 2 percent of VC investment — but lacks any data on funding specific to the legal tech industry (though presumably, it’s comparable).

Though I’m troubled by the lack of diversity among legal tech startups, I’m also willing to give the industry a pass at least while it’s in its nascency. Here’s why: because legal technology has helped more women salvage and advance their legal careers than any other segment of the legal industry.

Let me use myself as an example. When I started my own law firm back in 1993, most lawyers maintained brick-and-mortar offices where they showed up each day to meet with clients and work with staff. Just the simple matter of getting information about a case docket meant dispatching a messenger to the courthouse (or going down yourself if you couldn’t afford a messenger) to copy the file for fifty cents a page. Preparing a brief and an appendix was an all-day affair, requiring the manual compilation and manual bate-stamping of thousands of pages and production of a dozen photocopies. Researching a brief likewise entailed a visit to the law library if you couldn’t afford the $600/month subscription fee for LEXIS. While this legwork was doable when I started out as an energetic 30-year old newlywed, it was untenable when I had my first child three years later and no longer had the luxury of losing two-hour hunks of time on administrative tasks when my childcare hours were limited. In this context, technology was life-changing. The Cornell LII  and Fastcase gave me an affordable way to do research from the comfort of my home 24/7. The advent of e-filing cut down the time involved in submitting court papers. Eventually, practice management systems and online billing enabled me to work seamlessly with a virtual assistant and remote contract lawyers, and to send invoices out more quickly to avoid cash flow problems.

If legal technology had not come on the scene when it did, I have no doubt that I would no longer be practicing law. I wanted to spend time with my daughters, and back then, law firms and even government agencies weren’t particularly accommodating. Indeed, many of my female contemporaries from my law school class who also wanted to focus on family left promising careers at mega-law firms and never returned.

What’s more, back then, no one within the legal profession cared about the departure of women from the legal profession. The prevailing view of Biglaw, the ABA, and law schools was that law is an equal-opportunity profession — and if a lawyer, whether male or female, put in the hours at a firm, he or she would eventually ascend to partnership. The entire legal profession was complicit in the gender caste system.

Technology generally and legal technology more specifically, changed all that. Women lawyers like Stephanie Kimbro Rania Combs and Rachel Rodgers harnessed the power of the cloud to build successful virtual law practices that enabled them to work from anywhere so they could tend to clients and family. The cloud also fueled the rise of the freelance lawyering industry which in turn, has given female attorneys part-time work opportunities while raising family.

But legal technology has done more than just help female lawyers keep a foot in the door. Today, a new generation of women lawyers like Megan Zavieh and Erin Levine are using legal tech not just to avoid losing ground in their careers, but to careen to the forefront by innovating like crazy. And as legal tech continues to reduce the cost of practicing law, starting and running a law firm has become a far more viable option for moms — such as the ones I profiled here, or for women who are tired of dealing with pervasive discrimination and would rather just practice law.

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Don’t get me wrong — the legal tech industry is far from perfect. Though women are more prominent than ever in the legal tech space, an old boys’ network remains intact — and Sonday’s study confirms that the industry still has a long way to go. But if I had to choose which segment of the legal profession has done the most to advance and support female attorneys, legal tech would win over Biglaw, the ABA, the judiciary and in-house departments hands down. It’s not even close.

Carolyn ElefantCarolyn Elefant has been blogging about solo and small firm practice at MyShingle.comsince 2002 and operated her firm, the Law Offices of Carolyn Elefant PLLC, even longer than that. She’s also authored a bunch of books on topics like starting a law practice, social media, and 21st century lawyer representation agreements (affiliate links). If you’re really that interested in learning more about Carolyn, just Google her. The Internet never lies, right? You can contact Carolyn by email at elefant@myshingle.comor follow her on Twitter at @carolynelefant.

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