Information Technology is the new ice-age and legal professionals cannot ignore the impacts of project management techniques or social media drivers.

My best friend from law school is a dinosaur. Not the scaly reptilian Godzilla type from Jurassic Park but equally scary.

He is functionally IT literate which means he can exchange emails at best. He explained that he has an IT guy for anything beyond that. And this is a highflying corporate lawyer who has won numerous awards and is a partner in a renowned law firm in India.

Another old friend, equally highly placed in one of India’s top Oil & Natural Gas companies, leading the organization’s entire legal division doesn’t use WhatsApp or any messaging services. He prefers an old model features phone and claims that he has no use for all this “social media nonsense”.

These two friends are highly educated, extremely professional and capable YOUNG men in their late 30’s who have achieved success in their chosen field and recognized for their work. And they are terrified of technology….

They are not alone.

Law firms and legal professionals are a late entrant in the changing world where digitization is a paradigm-shifting event occurring daily. The digital revolution has exploded exponentially within the timeframe. The rate of technology growth currently ensures that anything taught in 4 years of engineering school gets outdated by the final year of education. And that’s in a technical domain – what chances would students from a law school have of keeping track of technological advances constantly.

One answer could be outsourcing but then would you have control over the direction and growth of your practice? It is hard enough to structure a client’s brief without the added hassle of translating your vision to someone who has no idea of the domain requirements. Any legal professional on the top of his/her game will have to embrace technology. Willingly or unwillingly, there is simply no other option as change is inevitable.

There will be collateral damage and that too is inevitable. Every paradigm shift involves a certain amount of pain in highly personalized terms.

The joke goes that the first bulldozer put a hundred men with spades out of a job and the first man with a spade put a thousand men with spoons out of jobs. A ridiculous analogy but automation and digitization will affect job profiles and make redundant a lot of the everyday clerical work. This leads to the main question every legal professional asks –

Why do it?

Because Automation = Increased Personal Profits

In a hyper-competitive market which favours the client, the idea is to minimize your effort while maximizing your profitability. Over-charge your client and they will simply find someone who provides the service cheaper.

Some would argue about the quality of service provided – after all, a reputed lawyer with an established practice cannot be compared to a rookie lawyer or worse, an incompetent one. This analogy holds true only for a relative specific service, i.e. litigation practice perhaps. But even there, there are benefits of applying technology. For everyday issues, however, service cost in a hyper-competitive market like India, cost is a huge driver for client choices.

In project management, every component of any given scenario can be broken down into components and processes which can then be analyzed for simplification or automation. This translates into a clearer understanding about the costs involved in service delivery, the time-frames for delivering on client expectations and finally, to objectifying a legal professional’s requirements into a faster, more reliable, higher quality, CHEAPER system improving upon delivery for the client’s expectations.

Like any other service industry, the client is usually king. The legal and medical fraternities would tend to disagree coming from a traditional mind-set of superior knowledge of client requirements rather than being client-requirement driven. In earlier times, a lawyer or a doctor was a feared, hugely respected god-like being who would cure ailments or problems and was accordingly treated as such. The world has since moved on and with it, the traditional mind-sets have changed as well.

Information Technology is the new ice-age and legal professionals cannot ignore the impacts of project management techniques or social media drivers.

The dinosaurs are soon going to be extinct.