Categories
Legal Tech

Quirks and Quacks – The Challenges of Selling Software to Lawyers

Categories
Legal Tech

Living in an Institution

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.

Categories
Legal Tech

Selling Software to Teckified Companies

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.

Categories
Legal Tech

What is the Left Hand Doing?

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

Categories
Legal Tech

My WFH (or WTF) Journey

They say that those who do not  learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

When I started practicing law in 1981, I went to the office six days a week. Sometimes six and a half. I never used my computer at the office, mainly because I did not have one.  Nor did anyone else.

Categories
Legal Tech

Somebody Hates Chat GPT

The more seditious and outrageous stuff that I write usually originates in my own tiny little brain. 

Occasionally the creative spark comes from another lawyer. This is one of those times. 

This particular lawyer sent me a rant about Chat GPT which I have edited slightly. For context, this lawyer’s firm loves Chat GPT, and this particular lawyer does not, but they have to pretend that they do so as not to anger the Partner Gods. They would rather go uncredited because they don’t want to be fired.

Categories
Legal Tech

Artificially Human?

I have a theory about life which I espouse in my less optimistic moments. My theory is that for many people, things become less and less familiar as they age. What is socially acceptable changes, people dress and act differently, friends and family move away and pass away, technology changes, and so on. Eventually everything is so unfamiliar that they do not feel that they belong in the world, and they are then ready to die of natural causes.

Categories
Legal Tech

Just Sit Home and Eat Doritos

I was telling my wife about the recent post by Frank Ramos about LinkedIn having an AI product to help us write our posts. Those of you have followed me for a while know that I think that I am kind of smart, but I know for a fact that my wife, Maureen McKay, is way smarter than me. She has a great ability to look at a fact situation and see where things are going to end up. Here is her take on the use of AI to write posts:

Categories
Legal Tech

Musings of a Medium-Tech Lawyer about Cruise ships, Technology, and Mental Health

Categories
Legal Tech

Enough Chatter About Chat GPT: Time to Move on Up

So, so much chatter about Chat GPT. I believe some of it. I think that some of it is nonsense.

Here is the bottom line:

  1. Lawyers did not go out of business when computers were invented and we lost all of those hours reviewing draft after draft of retyped documents.
  2. We were still able to generate enough billable hours, even after we became able to produce documents faster with document automation software.
  3. Online legal databases did not replace articling students and junior associates.