Categories
Legal Tech

Field of Dreams

Bob was a brilliant lawyer. He loved technology and was a wizard at math.

Back in the day when we used fax machines and they stood alone somewhere near the photocopier, Bob became enamoured with the idea of software that would allow the assistants to send faxes from their desktop. Bob ran various scenarios to demonstrate how much money we would save if we purchased this product. He calculated the salary and benefits earned by each assistant per minute and multiplied it by the number of minutes each assistant spent walking to and from the fax machine every day. We were going to save a fortune.

Categories
Legal Tech

Danger Ahead!

Back in the day, I used to teach junior lawyers how to practice law. I had me some rules. They went something like this:

  1. Do not delegate something that you do not know how to do yourself. If you do, how are you going to know if the work product is correct?
  2. Do not include anything in a document if you do not know why it is there. I will be unimpressed if you give me a document and cannot explain why you included every single word in it.
  3. As a corollary to Rule number 2, never say to me that you included something ‘because it was in the precedent.’ If you do that, I will be apoplectic and that will not be a good thing for either of us.

These rules helped me train a number of junior lawyers to be pretty good at what they did.

Categories
Legal Tech

My Summer With the Great White Sharks

In 2014, I was pretty fed up with life and I decided to do something different. Since my years practicing law had not prepared me to take any really big risks, I decided to take a small one. I rented a cottage on Cape Cod for the summer and set out to prove that I could work from anywhere.

Categories
Legal Tech

Old Law, New Law: Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

In the old days, the path to success in the legal profession seemed fairly straight forward: Get top marks; article for a good firm (the larger the better); get hired back; work a tonne of hours; become a partner.

With success came prestige and money.

Categories
Legal Tech

Don’t Miss the Tipping Point

Back when I started practicing law, fax machines were just coming into vogue. This was an extremely useful development, especially since email had not been invented yet.

The timeline for the introduction of fax machines into law offices had two distinct markers.

Categories
Legal Tech

The Button

In my second year of practice, word processing was just becoming a thing.

My firm had fourteen lawyers but no word processor. Fred was the senior partner. I told him that we really needed one of those new-fangled machines.