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Empowering Proficiency With The Legal Tech Assessment

Ari Kaplan speaks with Casey Flaherty, the founder of Procertas and the creator of the Legal Tech Assessment

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Ari Kaplan speaks with Casey Flaherty, the founder of Procertas and the creator of the Legal Tech Assessment, a competency-based learning and benchmarking platform focused on the core technology associated with the delivery of legal services.

Ari Kaplan: Tell us about your background and the genesis of the Legal Tech Assessment.

Casey Flaherty: I have worked as an associate for an AmLaw 100 law firm and as in-house counsel at a large corporation. Now, I provide consulting to law departments and law firms. While I was practicing at a firm, I saw a lot of things that I wouldn’t want to pay for as a client, and almost none of them had to do with expertise. The partners were brilliant and what they did was valuable, but the way the expertise of the firm’s lawyers was or wasn’t leveraged through technology really concerned me. I saw a lot of inefficiency in the labor-intensive side of legal work. When I moved in-house, I wanted to weave a culture of continuous improvement into the fabric of our relationship.

To that end, I visited law firms, armed with billing data, and met mainly associates and paralegals, although also administrators, and watched them work. I took notes on how they performed their tasks and developed a list of ways that they could have done them better. My main finding was that people spent most of their time on Word, Excel, PDF, email, and document management, and they were mostly terrible at using those tools. Without data, however, you’re just another person with an opinion so I created an assessment because the low-hanging fruit of productivity is getting better at the tools we already have at our disposal. It is one thing to diagnose the disease, but it is another to come up with the cure. Once you’ve identified what people don’t know, you give them training and then you can use the assessment to validate that the training was actually effective.

Ari Kaplan: What are some of the advantages for employers who are offering or employees that are leveraging the Legal Tech Assessment?

Casey Flaherty: Better, faster, cheaper, and happier. This is, of course, about speed, which we equate to money in the legal industry for obvious reasons. If you know how to use certain features, you will get your work done more quickly, but it’s not just that it gets done quicker, it gets done better. That ultimately improves one’s quality of life because using technology more effectively minimizes many of the mind-numbing and boring tasks that lawyers must perform.

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Ari Kaplan: Are law schools teaching the skills that you are measuring?

Casey Flaherty: We have had over 40 law schools use our software, with some offering it to all of their students and others limiting it to select courses.

Ari Kaplan: What do law students gain by using this tool?

Casey Flaherty:  Practical skills that make them far more practice-ready. It is also a differentiator on their resumes. If a student scores well on our assessments, the student is given a digital badge from a third-party administrator. We are creating mechanisms for transparency and accountability.

Ari Kaplan: What’s your business model?

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Casey Flaherty:  We have a low-cost flat fee for law schools. For law departments, it tends to be about $50 per person. The larger the department, the lower the cost per person for enterprise licenses. For law firms, its $99 per person, which decreases depending on the license.

Ari Kaplan:  Given the proliferation of technology, what level of experience do employers expect of their new hires?

Casey Flaherty:  They have a poorly calibrated expectation that anyone who is being hired already knows this. We have bought into the myth, in particular, of the digital native, which has been disproven over and over again. In fact, we have over 5,000 users in our system and the results validate that most people struggle with technology beyond simple usage.

Ari Kaplan:  How do you see legal education changing to meet these expectations?

Casey Flaherty: I would like to integrate this kind of training into the curriculum. For example, in contracts, students would learn the mechanics of constructing an agreement, and in civil procedure, they would learn how to create an e-filing. We can do more within the traditional curriculum to integrate this kind of basic practical training.

Ari Kaplan regularly interviews leaders in the legal industry and in the broader professional services community to share perspective, highlight transformative change, and introduce new technology. 

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