Law (As Opposed to the Real World)
Few things move slower than the law. Possibly snails. The adherence to precedent, the organizational schema that define leading firms, and the education model that starts in law school and continues in continuing ed - and in the practice of law itself - all conspire to maintain a status quo that more likely trails than tracks the real world. So to the extent that corporations are doing something interesting, law firms are likely to do it a decade later.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ABA’s recent 2008 Legal Technology Survey Report. The highlights are boiled down in the September issue of the ABA Journal, under the title “Web 2.0 Still a No-Go.” The justification for the title is pretty solid: only 15% of lawyers surveyed have joined a social network. Only 28% of the respondents consult blogs as a “current-awareness tool” once a week. Only 10% (one must assume that these are the hardcore) utilize RSS feeds to read those blogs. In other words, mere participation in social media is limited to a tiny minority of attorneys (at least among the survey sample). Active engagement? Well, 8% of law firms maintain a blog, and 2% of lawyers do the same.
ZOMG!
I don’t need to explain that this is appalling. The biggest risk in writing this post is that I will spin off into a tirade against the entire information architecture of the industry; firms stand on the precipice of an information management catastrophe. What is truly horrifying about the situation is that they don’t seem to care. There are good reasons for this. Lawyers, like consultants, have one commodity - time. The hourly billing metric remains the de facto standard for performance, at an individual and organizational level. So any time left unbilled (even in the name of business development or information architecture) is going to be a fight. But the development of rational information management and social media engagement strategies is going to be critical for the future health of firms.
Two Prongs
The first problem is specific to data management. In the old days, a crate fell out of a window and hit an old lady. You didn’t need a scrap of paper to stand up in court and say “res ipsa loquitur, sucka!” Nowadays, the hard drives of the warehouse, the emails between the floor manager, the night staff, and the window washer would all be reviewed. The jitney driver’s recent annual review. The policy manual and floor chart. The meta-data (where are the records about how you keep records?). You’d still stand up in court and say your Latin, but before you got to, you would enter the realm of discovery. The term here loses all of its “adventure into the unknown” qualities and reduces down to “wading through paper, or worse, scans of paper saved in some obscure file extension that requires our Super! Special! Viewing System! to shuffle through, print or read.” And that’s just the litigation end. Imagine due diligence on a deal of some type (not that lawyers do that - see “sub-prime lending crisis”).
This is too much stuff to just take pictures of, and yet in my former life as a litigation grunt I would find myself scanning image after image for relevance/privilege/usefulness. I know that there’s a next-generation system just waiting to happen, parsing mountains of crap for specific keywords and then bundling them together in a configuration space for ease of review. I want to meet the person who could make that happen and give him a million dollars. Or find someone else who wants to give him a million dollars, and broker the deal. Because the legal profession is going to buckle under if it doesn’t solve the problem.
The second prong seems less important, because it’s about all this Web 2.0 bullshytt. However, while less urgent, it is no less important. The success or failure of legal practice may in fact revolve around the ability to track with (not trail behind) emerging social media communities. This is not just because client relationships will be a heck of a lot easier if you know what your clients are talking about. It is also because social media threatens to swamp regulatory frameworks and legal schema of all sorts. This is not the Law of the Horse. It is, for the law, an epoch-shaking event whose magnitude cannot be understated.
Whither Law?
The mainline practice of law is not going to (radically) change any time soon. However, the firms that start making the small adjustments necessary to welcome the shifts in the real world may well find themselves in possession of a massive number of clients who are looking for someone who “gets it.” And I pity anyone who thinks that business as usual makes any kind of sense anymore - they will fall from “good enough” to hemorrhaging clients (and attorneys), and wonder what happened.
