Debunking 3 Legal Technology Myths

Legal technology columnist Jeff Bennion dispels some misconceptions about what it means to be a tech-friendly law office.

technology myth tech mythsLately, I’ve talked to a lot of people who have some misconceptions about what it means to be a tech-friendly law office. Let’s dispel some nonsense right now:

That It Applies to Everyone the Same

There are very few things that apply to each area of this profession across the board. If you do real estate transaction law, you are not going to have the same needs in your office as a public defender. For example, I do personal injury law. I don’t use software to manage my contacts to get repeat business. In fact, I hope to never have to represent my clients twice. That’s a pretty straightforward concept. But, when I make comments about the effectiveness of using a website or social media for marketing, that might not apply to you and that’s okay. For example, if you do bankruptcy or corporate formations, or any transactional flat-fee work, a website could really help you find a lot of clients. If you represent large corporations in contentious litigation, the CEO probably found you from a referral and not by searching for a business lawyer on Yelp or Twitter.

That If You Don’t Get on Board, You’ll Die

I am a huge proponent of legal technology. I run a fairly tight practice using all of the technology shortcuts I can, and it has helped me to grow and be efficient. I know a lot of really successful attorneys who do not use the cloud and do not have any practice management software, and they are doing just fine. As time passes, you will of course have to update your office from time to time, but you do not have to jump on every trend because not every trend is a game changer. I talk to a lot of lawyers who are incredibly rich and successful and they tell me that all of that legal technology stuff is a bunch of mumbo jumbo. They look around and see how much money they have made. I look around and see how much money they have lost by not using the right tools.

Using technology in your firm is not usually about being revolutionary. It’s mostly about using shortcuts to do things that would usually be impossible or extremely time consuming. For example, not too long ago, I was searching across about 25 PDF copies of depositions for some key words. A good lawyer might print out all of those depo transcripts and read through them and highlight them and put post-its on them and prepare an index or summary to help search for key words. A better businessman might OCR each of the PDFs and do a text search in each one and prepare an index of key words, reducing a week-long task to a few hours. An even better businessman might use Adobe Acrobat to prepare an index of all PDFs in a folder and with a few clicks, prepare a report that instantly searches across all of those PDFs and extracts excerpts of all of the key words you searched, reducing that project from a few hours to about 10 minutes. If you are in trial and don’t have a couple of hours or days to spare, you won’t get what you need. Otherwise, you will, but you’ll spend more money and time doing that task.

Technology is usually not about becoming a better lawyer – that’s what CLEs and mentors are for. Technology is about running a more effective law business using shortcuts. In most cases, it won’t kill you if you don’t adopt technology, and you can still be a successful lawyer. But, I will choose to use my day moving my cases forward because my files are organized in a document management system and I don’t waste time looking for things, instead of doing time-wasting, mundane tasks. I will choose to get better verdicts and settlements because I can use technology to tell better stories. I will choose to use better tools to help me manage evidence in mass-torts cases to sort and filter key records. If you don’t do those things, that’s fine too.

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That It Only Applies to [Biglaw/Small Law/Solos/Mid-sized Firms/Litigators/Transactional]

When I talk to Biglaw people, they say, “Oh, we have an IT department that makes all of our decisions. Legal tech suggestions are for small firms where the lawyers are more hands-on.” I talk to people at small firms and they say, “Oh, we don’t have a budget for legal technology. That stuff is for the big law firms.” Transactional people tell me it’s mostly for litigators, and litigators tell me it’s mostly for transactional people.

The bottom line is that there is room in almost every practice area and almost every firm size to find some tool that could help you run your practice a little more efficiently. Some tools are expensive, like ediscovery software, while others are cheap, like the $3 a month SharePoint or the Excel or OneNote or Word programs that you likely already have but don’t fully understand how to use (including all of the shortcuts available in each piece of software).

Conclusion

People misjudge what legal technology is and what it’s supposed to do for you. You don’t need to have a wall full of monitors with Matrix code flowing down them to be a “tech-friendly” practice. If there’s some practice area that you think is immune to changing technologies, or you don’t know how to use technology in your particular field, let me know and I’ll look into it.

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Jeff Bennion is Of Counsel at Estey & Bomberger LLP, a plaintiffs’ law firm specializing in mass torts and catastrophic injuries. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of San Diego’s plaintiffs’ trial lawyers association, Consumer Attorneys of San Diego. He is also the Education Chair and Executive Committee member of the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section. He is a member of the Advisory Council and instructor at UCSD’s Litigation Technology Management program. His opinions are his own. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at jeff@trial.technology.

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