Tech Enabled Lawyer: A guide to making the most of the tools you have and spotting the tech you need

Introduction

Why now is the time to become a tech enabled lawyer

If you picked up this book, you already know that technology can enhance your ability to consistently deliver great legal services to your clients. I’m sure you didn’t become a lawyer because you wanted to spend hours entering title details into a field in a precedent, or doing office admin, or wrestling with Word.

At the end of a day filled with meetings and phone calls, when you finally turn to the pile of work waiting for some uninterrupted time, how much of it is low-level admin? Every time you copy one piece of data from one place to another, you wonder how to rise above this busywork so you can have more time to concentrate on the tricky and more satisfying parts of your job. More time to really listen to clients and explore their problem, not just the immediate crisis they have called you about but the bigger context. You need enough headspace to help them navigate the shoals that lie ahead.

You know there are tech tools that can ease the burden of these manual processes, and you have investigated and even implemented a few, but it doesn’t seem to have shifted the needle. You can see the potential and are willing to use the tools, but you just have too much to do and not enough time to work out how to make best use of them.

You probably have a pile or a folder of articles and promotional materials from legal tech vendors you mean to read – when you have time. You might have signed up to webinars you never watched. It seems every day there is another new tech product and it’s hard to work out what is just noise and what could be transformational. You could easily spend hours every day reading blogs, watching webinars, trying demos and talking to people about the tools that are available.

But even if you did spend all that time, months later you may understand exactly what the market offers but still not have made any changes.

Trapped in busywork

I know how frustrating it is when you can’t get on with the important work your clients want because you are spending hours searching for documents or fixing file formatting or cutting and pasting data.

Do any of these experiences resonate with you?

You work hard and provide great legal advice to your clients, but feel you could be doing better.

You have more work than you and your team can comfortably handle, but you recognise there is no capacity to handle growth in your current way of working.

You have been trying to hire additional legal staff for months but aren’t getting any qualified candidates responding to the ads and your best paralegal got poached for a salary you couldn’t match.

You are too busy to contemplate disrupting the systems you have, which are only just coping.

You know tech tools could partially automate some of the work you do, but when you investigated there were so many options you found it overwhelming and put it off.

When you discussed your idea to automate some of your processes, your colleagues and teammates weren’t sure it would work and said things are okay as they are.

You aren’t sure what more you could be doing with the tech you have.

You received some training in Microsoft Office when you started work but you haven’t had time to attend any more training since.

You have an idea for a project that would standardise and speed up some of your work, but you haven’t had time to get started on it.

You started your firm on a shoestring. It has grown into a team and you want to upgrade to a more robust tech platform but aren’t sure how.

You previously invested in tech you thought would be helpful, but it really didn’t deliver as promised (you could call it a disaster) and you are cautious about getting burned again.

If any of these sound familiar, you are not alone. I speak to lawyers every day who are great at practising law and want to take advantage of new tools but feel quite out of their depth about using tech.

The time is now

If you spend most of your day on the phone, in meetings, drafting documents in Word and sending emails in Outlook, it can be hard to see where tech can help. One colleague told me, ‘I don’t need more tech because I spend my day negotiating’. You can continue to be a highly effective negotiator using pen, paper and a phone, but it’s risky to assume your competitors will also ignore tools that alleviate some of the burden – 92% of respondents to a survey of Australian law firms thought their firm should increase investment in technology.¹ Can you afford to let your competitors have this advantage?

Some of the tools I use seem almost magical: eDiscovery software can review a million documents and within minutes isolate the ones I need for a particular timeframe for less than $500; being able to populate an entire suite of transaction documents with relevant details and be confident they are consistent at the click of a button; turning a long list of numbers into a filtered table or a neat graph with a few clicks. Why wouldn’t you want to make the most of these transformational tools?

In our daily lives we take for granted powerful computers that present what we need, when we need it, in the context of the problem we’re trying to solve. I barely leave home without checking on my phone the best route in the current traffic conditions, or the weather. I no longer memorise phone numbers. And I don’t worry about filing anymore because I can easily find what I need, wherever I might be, using the powerful search on my phone. And have you appreciated the convenience of a telehealth appointment with your GP, and electronic prescriptions?

Retail products and services are now extremely personalised. Online food ordering systems remember my previous orders. Spotify serves up a list of the music I might like based on the songs I’ve listened to before. Retailers I like show their banner ads on my favourite websites.

We all use tech during our day-to-day lives – why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of the convenience and the power of those tools in your working life too?

Although law has been largely sheltered from outside competition because of the requirement to be admitted to practice, this barrier is crumbling. Legal services are not immune from the trend to customer-centricity. Customers will not put up with slow, inefficient and poor-value legal services. Even before the pandemic there were signs that Australian legal businesses were using tech tools to respond to pricing pressure and to enable more flexible delivery of legal services. The success of businesses such as Lawpath and LegalVision (discussed later) demonstrate the trend.

Source: Macquarie Bank 2020 Legal Industry Pulse Check. bit.ly/3gZXhbC

Many law firms are taking steps to change how they deliver legal services – according to Eric Chin of PWC NewLaw, ‘half of Australia’s top law firms have made commitments to legal innovation, a seven-fold rise since 2015’.² Macquarie Bank’s Legal Industry Pulse Check 2020³ found that between 2017 and 2019 usage of tech tools expanded dramatically, as shown in this chart.

The take-up accelerated during the pandemic. A survey by Thomson Reuters found that during the COVID-19 pandemic 41% of corporate counsel in Australia reported that their legal departments increased their investment in technology.⁴ The top areas of investment were legal research tools, and reporting and dashboard solutions. And 59% of law firms increased their investment in technology over the same period. Law firms’ top investments were in legal operations management solutions, legal research tools, and know-how and precedent solutions.

Globally, legal tech companies have seen more than US$1.6 billion in venture capital in 2021, a huge increase on the US$510 million invested in 2020.⁵

Not here, not now

There will be some people in your firm, and they may not all be partners, who just don’t like the sound of being more tech enabled. The firm is doing just fine financially as it is, right? You can just pay for a skilled admin assistant to do the manual tasks. The clients are happy with how things work. Changing things is adding unnecessary complexity and no one has time.

Some may worry about the security of data stored in the cloud. Or tell you about the bias in AI systems when used in criminal justice in the US. They won’t be able to explain exactly how that is relevant to using AI for a first-pass review of contracts in Australia, but they will be dead-set certain the tech is just not ready yet.

Another colleague will tell you she doesn’t do enough volume contract work to justify expenditure on standardisation and automation systems.

Some of the more junior lawyers will be nervous that if you introduce more automation you will remove some of the work that fills their timesheets and they won’t have a job. Other younger people will reject having to poke about in software to improve it. They are used to simple interfaces and fast results.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all tech solution to these concerns. Some concerns may be irrelevant to what you are proposing. Some of them may be justified. Whether they make sense or not, you need to objectively assess against the risk posed by not changing in a world that is moving online.

It’s only going to get harder if you don’t act

The growth in the number of technology workers in Australia has been 1.5 times the growth in professional occupations.⁶ Tech jobs are forecast to grow at 5% per year for the next five years.⁷ There was a 57% growth in online ecommerce in 2020–21.⁸

Gartner reports that at least 84% of companies in other industries and 59% of government entities have set up multidisciplinary teams.⁹ IT is no longer a support service delivering internal projects but is integral to an organisation creating products that deliver value to its customers. In the US, 22% of law firms surveyed by Altman Weil said they were losing clients to firms that had become tech enabled.¹⁰

Legal analysis is itself getting harder. Operating in a digital world means juggling a trifecta of more information to be assessed, an increasingly complex regulatory environment and a faster operating pace.

Statistics about the exponential growth in the volume of data created and consumed every day are hard to comprehend. One estimate is that the amount of information in the world is increasing at more than 19% compound annual growth rate.¹¹

The volume of regulatory instruments is also expanding. Australian companies are subject to complex and long laws, not just legislation but also regulations, delegated legislation, guidelines and information statements. The Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) is not only nearly 4,000 pages long, it uses 1,000 defined terms and 570 of those have different meanings in different sections of the Act.¹² ASIC Chairman Joseph Longo thinks that technology and data will be pivotal to how ASIC regulates business in the future.¹³

If you don’t have a strategic approach to adopting tech tools, the long-term performance of your business will not flatline but it will decline. The impact will be to drive down performance over time as your business becomes increasingly less efficient and falls behind industry best practice.

Tech is not a magic bullet solution to all problems facing a legal practice. Putting into place some of the concepts discussed in this book will involve much more than just using your credit card to sign up for a cloud-based app. There are some fundamental questions to grapple with and some hard work associated with implementing change. But reading this book will help you get a handle on how to assess where you are, where you want to be and how to navigate the gap in between.

‘Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.’

Bill Gates

How to use this book

A few years ago I went to the College of Law on Elizabeth Street in Sydney for a panel talking about whether lawyers need to learn to code. In a large bland room overlooking the green Moreton Bay figs in Hyde Park, a bunch of besuited solicitors sat on neat rows of black chairs. At the end of the session, an older fellow in the crowd waved his arm as if he was signalling to a lifesaver. ‘This is all very well,’ he said, clearly used to projecting his voice across a crowded courtroom, ‘but what is the definitive book, the guide to implementing state-of-the-art systems in a law firm?’ The panel members tried to explain that the software they were discussing was new, that they were trying new things all the time, so there was no definitive guide yet.

The gentleman was unsatisfied, and seemed sure that someone must have worked it out. Why should we all have to start from scratch?

This book is not the definitive guide to implementing state-of-the-art tech solutions in a law firm. I very much doubt such a book could be achieved, and if someone somewhere managed to write it, it would be hopelessly out of date by the time it was published. But I also don’t think everybody should have to start from scratch.

I wrote this book as a guide for lawyers on where to get started, that would be useful whether you are working in a NewLaw business without timesheets or in a traditional law firm with heavily customised practice management software, if you are a lawyer working in a government department with strictly locked-down systems or an in-house legal department with no budget to upgrade your software.

This book will help you become a tech enabled lawyer in two ways.

Firstly, it provides a framework to enable you to confidently assess the changes that are likely to be useful to your practice or your firm, so you invest your precious time and energy in the right places. It will help you cut through some of the never-ending noise about tech and innovation.

Secondly, it is a helpful guide to making the most of your existing software, and offers low-cost solutions for common tasks in day-to-day practice.

This book is not about how to transform your law firm’s business model. There are many good reasons why lawyers are redesigning the way legal services are delivered. A number of very useful books have been written for lawyers who want to transform the legal practice business model, to re-engineer how they price their services and how they can approach large-scale innovation projects. Many are referred to throughout this book, and there is a further reading list at the end.

But what about legal businesses that have no plans to move away from hourly billing? Those businesses can still benefit from improving their systems, optimising the tech they already have and introducing innovative projects. This book can help lawyers who are still working in traditional ways but who want to take things one step at a time to improve. The great thing about starting with small steps is that, like compound interest, you can build some momentum that delivers lasting returns by consistent application of small amounts of effort.

Use this book as a guide to help you identify some things that will change the way you work. They can be implemented quickly and often without needing to involve the IT department or the innovation committee. There are many more tools than the ones I have suggested that will do the same thing. Some of them may even be better. But in a world where there is ever-increasing choice, one of the challenges is to just get started. We can’t be paralysed searching for the perfect solution.

I will introduce you to some tools you may not be aware of and remind you of ways to make better use of the tools you already have. Start with the suggestions in this book that immediately appeal to you. Keep it handy as a reference when you need to remember how to do the thing that will make the job easier. I will also suggest how to assess the way you work so you are clear about the problems that are hindering performance. Once you truly understand the problem you are better placed to go looking for a solution.

Ambitious plans to deliver an automated workflow require a willingness to try new things throughout your firm. If you find just the thought of this exhausting, try some of the ideas in this book on your lunchbreak and see which ones help you get what you need to get done each day done faster, more consistently and with less brainpower. It is about small changes you can make to the way you work, as an individual or as part of a team. There are worthwhile changes you can make in a lunchtime – remember the hour when you should be taking a break in your day?

If you use a strategic framework like the one in this book, even if you don’t find a tool that can help you now, you will have a few on your radar and you can keep tabs on how they develop. And you will understand the sort of work that is well suited to automation and expert systems. You will be able to shape your practice so you can use your time to serve clients with the skill and expertise that can’t be replaced by tech-assisted tools. You will be better placed to future-proof your law practice.

In writing this book I resigned myself to the fact that I could not cover all of the best legal tech solutions that are available for the Australian market. Even if I managed to pull it off, by the time the book was published it would be out of date within weeks. I have instead tried to highlight a snapshot of the range of products that can accomplish everyday tasks lawyers do. My hope is that by looking at the work at a task level, it is easier to find a way to adopt tech incrementally. For most of the topics discussed in this book, I have additional and regularly updated information on my website (www.fionamclay.com.au) so make sure you check that out as well.

Accept that no one tool will do everything and there is no magic bullet to quick transformation. Taking some time to understand how tech can help you respond to the shift in the legal services market is the next best thing.

Part I

Old law, new tricks

Chapter 1

Are we there yet?

What your clients want is changing

The trend has been clear for some time: clients want more personalised service. They want the benefit of your judgment and expertise, delivered efficiently. Increasing dissatisfaction with the cost of legal services is also clear from a number of long-term trends. The continued growth of in-house teams demonstrates that more organisations believe the best way to obtain cost-effective legal expertise that understands their business is to employ a lawyer. In Australia, there has been strong growth in the corporate in-house legal and government legal sectors over the past nine years. Growth in corporate (82%) and government (88%) has outstripped growth in law firms (30%) over the same period, and 7 in 10 law firms in the US reported