Technology

It's The Little Things That Make Practicing Easier

Feedback is important.

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The annual ABA TECHSHOW was the last major event I participated in before the world locked down. Right before leaving Chicago in 2020, we all knew that COVID would wreak havoc on the country, but assumed that the combination of a global forewarning and the contact tracing and isolation protocols that successfully stifled the H1N1 outbreak would largely shield the country from devastation. We hadn’t counted on the option that no one in government was going to bother with any of that. There’s a lesson in there about never setting your expectations too high I suppose.

In any event, the world did undergo an extended crisis and the past year saw the legal technology space hypercharged as technoskeptic attorneys had to throw themselves fully into the legal tech world.

And as useful as that’s been for the attorneys themselves, it’s also been a boon for the tech providers themselves to finally have an opportunity to elicit feedback from a new population of lawyers facing new challenges in using these solutions.

Chatting with MyCase about its new developments, it struck me just how much it’s the little things that make practice easier. Or, probably more accurately, it’s the little things from the user’s perspective because what may seem like a small change still requires hours and hours of coding and testing.

For example, MyCase now offers in-app document editing. Users may not have even thought about this before since it’s so easy to grab documents and edit them, but the convenience of keeping everything in one application can’t be understated. Beyond the ease of use, it’s a huge deal for security. Instead of downloading and re-uploading documents, creating bunches of unnecessary copies on a variety of devices, the edited documents get seamlessly synced within MyCase. Word, Adobe, Excel… whatever lawyers are using, all changes made are automatically saved and instantaneously appear in MyCase as a new document version.

Or an internal chat feature so lawyers don’t have to close out of MyCase to ping a colleague. In the small firm world, this may not have seemed like a necessary feature until now. When the partner is just down the hall, there’s no need to keep a chat function open. But with people at home, instant messaging became essential.

One update that MyCase told me about that didn’t have its origins in the response to COVID, but in the changing legal business model, is a billing feature for firms that work on a subscription model. Enter the subscription price and billing frequency, and clients are automatically invoiced on a regular basis.

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That’s kind of the theme of the last year in legal tech. No more “our AI product is replacing expert witnesses!” and more “look at how much easier we’ve made this.” And it’s progress that we’ve achieved in no small part by opening up the process to new voices who might not have made the plunge into legal technology but for the pandemic.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior 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. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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