Technology has been integrated into and worked magic upon many professions—engineers, architects and accountants are prime examples. Countless reports, experts, consultants, and happy, successful lawyers all insist that the legal profession can benefit just as much, if not more, from investing in technology.
Yet I'm frequently asked by frustrated lawyers how they go about getting their partners to adopt new technology. Though lawyers embrace technology in greater numbers every day, the wall of resistance is still formidable. In fact, some days it feels like a brick wall, and it's just about as easy to reason with.
Fortunately, there are solutions to this frustration. Here are 12 typical excuses commonly cited by lawyers as reasons why they haven't adopted and won't adopt technology. Each comes with proposed answers to these objections, or strategies you can take to get around them. Now you'll be ready to respond the next time you hear a colleague say....
1. "I don't see how this will help my bottom line."
Adult educators have found that if learners consider information to be highly valuable, they will put some effort into learning it. Otherwise, learners simply steer their efforts to other interests. The challenge for those introducing new technology is to make the business case for why the lawyers should acquire the new information.
While this may sound trivial, many implementations of new technology fail because of the proponent's mistaken belief that since he sees the new technologies' benefits, these benefits are also evident to other lawyers and staff who therefore will be motivated to master the technology. Any new technology initiative must be preceded by anticipating not only the "what" of the new system, but also the "why," and more importantly, "why should I?"
2. "If it ain't broke, why fix it?"
There will always be someone in the firm who will say: "We've done it this way for a millennium—why should we change now?" There's also a common variation: "The rest of you can go to the new system—just don't change how I work." However, don't start running two parallel systems. You'll find it in incredible drain on energy, time and resources, and frustrating to everyone but those who never changed.
If you've made the business case for switching to a new way of doing things and you still have one or two holdouts, you have three choices. Either convince everyone to go to the new system, or resign yourself to always doing things the old way, or—with increasing frequency—leave the firm and find a group of new lawyers willing to try new ideas.
3. "I can't afford to lose the billable time."
This lawyer perceives a conflict between her needs and the needs of the firm. She has a real fear that she'll be adversely affected by the docket time lost to trying out new technology. It's a legitimate concern, but it prevents the firm from moving forward with technology uniformly and consistently. Moreover, it's a surmountable fear.
A good solution would be for the firm to adjust its compensation formula, so that time spent learning and adopting the new technology equals paid billable hours. By recognizing the lawyer's financial concerns, this solution smooths over the perceived conflict and benefits both the lawyer and the firm by facilitating the adoption of the new technology.
4. "I've got too much else to do."
Related to #3, this opposition springs not from the loss of billing time, but from the real potential of falling even further behind in the backlog of existing work. Many lawyers simply can't stop the treadmill long enough to squeeze in something new.
The problem here is much bigger than introducing new technology—the lawyer is simply overworked, and burnout is going to figure prominently in his or her near future. The solution is to lighten the load—assign an associate to help shoulder part of the burden, or for sole practitioners, hire a law clerk. Find a way to restore sanity to your work calendar.
5. "That stuff is for the tech people. I practise law."
Responses like these often provide cover for a deeper fear: the lawyer is afraid to show that there's something he or she might not actually know. Vulnerability is the Achilles' heel of even the best lawyers.
In a traditional teacher-learner environment, there's a dynamic at work: the teacher is seen as the source of knowledge, and consequently is ascribed power; the learner is perceived as the receiver of knowledge, the "empty vessel" waiting to be filled—powerless. This is not a place where lawyers, who maintain a self-image of control and intellectual mastery, want to find themselves.
To avoid this dynamic, try offering one-on-one learning sessions that minimize the lawyer's exposure in front of others in the firm. Create an inclusive learning environment, in which the educator is more of a facilitator than a "giver of knowledge." Remember how important it is for lawyers to save face.
If your colleague does in fact say that this is the techies' responsibility, remind them that learning the technology isn't an administrative task they can delegate to a staffer. It's an inherent and important part of the way lawyers practise today, and requires the same level of dedication and attention as keeping up with caselaw and staying in touch with clients.
6. "Why should I have to pay for this?"
It's well-established that law firms, even at the best of times, are undercapitalized, because partners are unwilling to reduce their draws to increase the capital assets of the firm. As a result, persuading partners to take home less or increase the bank debt in order to acquire technology can be an uphill battle.
Approach this problem with a technology plan closely tied to the business objectives of the firm. If the firm's management committee endorses the business objectives, and if those objectives are tied to increasing effectiveness and profitability through technology (doing things faster, better and more cheaply), then making the money argument becomes a whole lot easier.
7. "All technology does is increase the overhead."
One of the knocks against tech is its ability to increase the office overhead without getting passed along in turn to the client. Take faxing, for example. Originally, acquiring a fax machine was an office expense that was successfully passed on to the client by levying a per-page fax charge.
But how do you charge clients for e-mail with attachments, especially when the client knows that e-mail itself is cheap, fast and inexpensive? Well, the client forgets—or ignores—the cost of installing and maintaining the e-mail system over the firm's office network and high-speed Internet line. It's a legitimate expense, but how to charge for it?
Ethical rules in each jurisdiction come into play here. If you are ethically permitted to do so, I would suggest (a) implementing a general office administration charge for each file, levied on a monthly basis or related to the amount of work done on the file; or (b) increasing your fees or billable rates by an amount calculated to recover the amortized technology costs over a three-year period.
8. "People would waste time surfing the Net."
I know of one medium-sized law firm that refused to allow staff and lawyers to gain desktop access to e-mail and the Internet, on the grounds that "people would just waste time reading and sending e-mail, playing games or looking at silly Internet sites."
There's no denying that a certain amount of exploration and experimentation will take place when introducing the Internet, as with any new technology—people are curious as to what something can and can't do. However, an Internet and e-mail Acceptable Use Policy would help make it clear that technology tools are to be used for valid business reasons only, and that consequences exist for those who choose to break those rules.
9. "I just don't have a head for technology."
No one wants to admit that they have trouble learning and using technology. But I believe the actual number of truly techno-challenged people is rather small. What we're perhaps seeing instead is people who learned how to deal with technology in a rote memorization way—learning facts without truly understandinghow things work. When these people are confronted with a problem that lies outside their rote understanding, they suffer high anxiety.
Accordingly, the key lies in first explaining the underlying principles behind the technology, then providing the information in small, manageable chunks, and lastly, giving rapid feedback that allows them to proceed at their own pace. This is not a mimic session; it allows the person to participate in the learning process and to develop a feel for thewhy, not just the how.
10. "I don't understand what this technology will actually do."
Far from being techno-snobs or phobes, these people have a hard time grasping what the technology actually accomplishes, and so find it difficult to lend it their support. Examples here might include litigators who've never used an electronic evidence analysis tool such as Summation. It lies outside their sphere of experience, and therefore they don't see the benefits in adopting it.
Try developing explanatory materials that compare the "old" versus the "new" ways of doing things, and how the users thereof can directly benefit. Provide direct demonstrations of the technology, or even better, seek out volunteers who will use the tech tool in a case. Once the lawyer sees first-hand the benefits of the technology, she can become an advocate for its adoption.
11. "Technology is boring."
Life is a bell-curve, and while there are those at one end of the curve who think, eat and breathe technology, there is an equal number on the other side for whom technology is nothing but a total bore. There's no sense trying to convert the bored to true believers—the best you can do is make them see the business case for adopting the technology and hope they have the good graces not to stand in your way.
Happily, there's a rather large group in between these two extremes, whose interest in technology ranges from mostly disinterested to quite intrigued. These are the people you realistically can work to convert.
12. "All I'm interested in is my job."
Ah, the self-centered lawyer who has no interest in helping the firm's or his or her own effectiveness. I left this type to the last for good reason—these folks are, I believe, the hardest group to deal with, because their self-absorption places a gulf between themselves and the firm's objectives. No arguments of overall efficiency, improvement or organizational gains dent their consciousness—they practise within a group only because it happens to benefit themselves.
But if you can find a way to demonstrate to these people how they personally stand to benefit, you may find that you now have one of the biggest allies in the firm for your technology project. Machiavellian considerations aside, this is an example of finding a silver lining in that dark cloud.
These 12 reasons are not all-inclusive. Rather, they're meant to be illustrative of the more common reasons given for not adopting or learning new technologies and how to deal with them.
So if you've despaired of ever implementing new technologies in your firm, use these dozen arguments as a resource to keep on fighting the good fight. As The Searchers once sang, don't throw your dreams away; keep them, for you may just need them someday.
David Bilinsky is the Practice Advisor with the Law Society of British Columbia in Vancouver and a long-time proponent of law office technology.