Tech Savvy Firms More Likely To Retain Attorneys
The Fall of the Luddites.
Maybe staying on top of the latest developments in legal technology does matter!
Yesterday, we broke down some of the new report from the Thomson Reuters Institute and Georgetown Law’s Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession. The long and short of it is that, even in an across-the-board sizzling lateral market, there’s a clear distinction between the firms losing attorneys and the firms holding attorneys. And money isn’t the key factor.
Most of the findings point to critical cultural differences between the broad categories of “Stay” firms and “Go” firms, but one chart late in the report highlighted a retention factor you might not have considered:
With the exception of the “innovator” tag — which would admittedly favor giant firms with in-house incubators and the like — the Stay firms outpace the Go firms at every level. And even the “innovator” gap is tiny. Generally speaking lawyers at Stay firms say they’re more likely ahead of the curve on technology and less likely to be behind it.
In addition to a tendency to be out in front of new technology, standout lawyers at Stay firms viewed collaboration technologies and knowledge management systems as being more useful to them than lawyers from other firms. This could be the result of Stay firms having better systems in place, of course, but it could also be that Stay firms have done a better job of integrating those systems into attorneys’ workflows such that lawyers feel these tools are more useful.
The latter observation is significant. Investing in technology isn’t the same as achieving buy-in with technology. To the extent Stay firms skew a little smaller, they have more opportunities to tailor the experience to the team. They have a better handle on what they want, fewer outlier stakeholders gumming up the works, and an easier training path.
But firms don’t have to be small to genuinely commit to making lawyers’ lives easier. Attorneys that feel more empowered to get the work done efficiently and without frustration are going to want to stay.
Not for nothing, but a more user friendly tech landscape might also help explain why these Stay lawyers tend to work more than their Go compatriots. It’s a lot easier to keep working and perform that last triple-check when using your computer doesn’t feel like a root canal.
Earlier: The Difference Between Keeping Lawyers And Losing Lawyers? It’s More Than Money.
Joe 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.
