Technology

New In-House Survey Confirms Again That Lawyers Need Their Hands Held

Failing to understand technology is not just for outside counsel!

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Just over a week ago, we learned that general counsel generally feel their outside counsel are technologically incompetent. It turns out that firms don’t need to feel quite so ashamed because in-house attorneys don’t feel all that competent either.

Maybe you can write off that last survey as “projecting.”

FTI Consulting and the Blickstein Group surveyed various stakeholders within corporate legal departments earlier this year to produce Law Department Operations Technology Survey: The Journey To Modernization, a rich report for those of us trying to take the temperature of the corporate legal department space.

And of all the takeaways in this report, one of the most interesting — juxtaposed against the general counsel survey — is just how lost the rest of the law department feels about tech.

Surprise! The legal ops people whose jobs are defined by leveraging technology are the only ones who feel they have a handle on technology. Which is probably true, but… I mean… what else were they going to say?

However, the real story is, yet again, that rank-and-file lawyers feel like 19th century prospectors when it comes to turning on their computer. The “not proficient” and “not very” figures among law department lawyers work out to be almost 95 percent of respondents. Which is roughly equal to the percentage of law department leaders who see themselves as “proficient” or “somewhat” proficient. Do we really believe the senior lawyers are more tech savvy than the rank and file? On the one hand, the tech procurement buck stops at leadership and its close involvement with legal ops might give senior attorneys additional insights. But on the other… well, that figure feels more like “you don’t know what you don’t know.”

But there’s reason to believe the folks driving legal tech procurement in these departments have their fingers on the problem based on two otherwise unconnected charts.

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“Increases efficiency” remains the biggest concern when it comes to judging effective technology — a stupid response to the extent it’s like saying “keeping me alive” is a prime concern for divers judging SCUBA gear. Increasing efficiency is more or less the definition of technology. Since the adoption of the “lever” technology has been about “increasing efficiency.” So let’s go ahead and discount that nonsense.

But second is “simple to use” which really is critical to implementing effective technology. Because…

“Training and adoption.” The challenge in legal technology is always training and adoption because the lawyers are rank Luddites and getting them on board will always be the biggest stumbling block. And, as legal tech companies have learned, attorneys aren’t sold on thicker and thicker manuals, but on simpler and more intuitive designs. And from the last chart, it seems as though law departments realize this too.

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Maybe by next year we can get those non-proficient numbers down to, I don’t know, a mere 90 percent!

Earlier: In-House Counsel Report Lawyers Keep Getting WORSE When It Comes To Technology

HeadshotJoe 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.

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