Stephen Shapiro is a speaker and advisor on business transformation. He wrote an article titled, “The Art of Decision Making” after the publisher rejected his preferred title of, “When You Sit on the Fence, You Get Splinters in Your Ass!” In his article, he argues that “movement in any direction is better than stagnation or indecision,” and he concludes that “if you sit on the fence, all you will get are splinters.”
This Article is about what lawyers need from LegalTech providers. I use Wills and Estates as an example, but the principles apply to many areas of practice.
You can read the article here: https://appara.ai/news-and-insights/where-theres-a-will
Do any of you old-timers remember the first ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Let me refresh your memory.
Dr. Jones retrieves the golden idol and tries to escape the cave. A giant boulder rolls towards him as he frantically tries to get out of its way. Finally he jumps over a cliff, only to come face to face with some scary looking natives with bows and arrows. Things only got worse for him from there.
We all know that when it comes to hiring people, “if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.” But what about when it comes to buying technology?
In a recent survey conducted by Appara about the State of Canadian Legaltech, eleven factors were identified as being important when law firms evaluate Legaltech, and cost was the third most-cited consideration, ranking just behind ease of use and features and functionality, but ahead of security, customer support, vendor reputation and reviews, and others.
There is no shortage of talk about the importance of lawyers delegating legal work to other lawyers and paralegals. Despite that, I have always believed that lawyers should not delegate work that they do not know how to do themselves. I questioned how anyone can check the quality of work done by their law clerks or associates if they do not know what a good job looks like.
Click here to read about why your future success as a lawyer will depend on you being able and willing to keep up as technology changes:
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?
Groucho Marx
I am a great fan of the institution of marriage. (Second marriages actually, but that would make for a much longer post.)
Anyone who has been married understands the concept of ‘institutional memory,’ which encapsulates your spouse’s recollection of why you were wrong before, are wrong now, and will likely be wrong in the future.
Yes, I made up the word “teckified” so I suppose that I have to make up a definition as well. It means “to use technology efficiently, including having databases which talk to each other, or better yet, a single database.”
If you are in the medical profession or the legal profession, you are likely not teckified. Teck-afraid perhaps, but probably not teckified.
Whether or not you are teckified matters. Allow me to explain.
Ogilvy, Cope, Porteous, Montgomery, Renault, Clarke & Kirkpatrick was the first law firm that I worked for. It is now known as Norton Rose Fulbright. The law firm where I spent most of my career was once called Pallett, Valo, Barsky, Kuzmarov & Keel. It is now Pallett Valo LLP.
What is with all of the name shortening? It has something to do with branding. The idea is to project to clients that the firm is a single entity, and that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
To a large extent it just ain’t so. Law firms are comprised of individual lawyers, often tenuously held together for the moment because their self-interests happen to align. One of the corollaries of this truth is that communication within a law firm is not always stellar. And when internal communication suffers, mistakes happen and opportunities are missed.
For example, the real estate department handles the sale of a house but does not communicate the new address to the corporate department. The house was the residence address of a director and the registered office address of a corporation. Nobody updates the filings. The director whose house was sold does not receive important correspondence. Bad things happen. The client is unamused.
The client wants to know why the law firm did not update its records when it handled the damn real estate transaction. Cue unhappy clients, negligence claims and other bad stuff.
Or perhaps poor communication results in lost opportunities to impress clients. Let’s take the example of a firm which drafts wills. It starts each new client engagement by sending an information questionnaire. If the request is made of a long-standing client, the client might be impressed if the questionnaire is pre-populated with information from the real estate department about which properties the client owns and from the corporate department about the companies in which the client own shares. Perhaps the client has invested in mortgages and that information can also be pre-populated. Or maybe the client is recently divorced (the firm having handled the domestic reorganization) and the questionnaire asks the appropriate questions for that situation.
But in many law firms this type of communication is not going to happen, and the client will be left with the impression that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing at their lawyer’s office.
What if the law firm’s information technology systems talked to each other? How many problems would that solve, and what types of opportunities for better client service would that present? Doesn’t it seem kind of obvious that this is the direction in which legal tech should be headed?
Appara thinks so. Check out information about their new platform here: https://bit.ly/3RZSs0j