Peer to Peer Magazine

49 WWW.ILTANET.ORG Bridging the Great Technology Schism: A Brief Manifesto FEATURES firms frequently devote great energy and debate to things like common taxonomies (categories) for email folders and document groupings, rather than leing users set these up how they make sense for their own practices. Advances in indexing and search technologies can and should support this kind of productivity, not stamp it out. Help Lawyers Overcome Our Worst Instincts: Although trying to push new work styles down from the top is rarely successful, good technology can give users incentives to overcome their worst instincts from the boom up. A good example of this is privacy and permissions for information and documents. Le to their own devices, lawyers will worry, "What if someone sees something they shouldn't?" rather than focus on the question that's oen more important: "What if someone doesn't see something they should?" Of course, things like ethical walls must be implemented where required, but these should be the exception, not the rule. It's typically harder to find information in a law firm having to do with, say, adverse possession, than it is to locate the same thing in the unorganized vastness of the web. (To test this, ask any new associate whether they find it more useful to search the web or your firm's system when they want to find information.) Technologists can help aorneys realize that the vast majority of work product can be shared by default without the sky falling, which would unlock a wealth of organizational data currently as invisible as dark maer in the universe. What Lawyers Need Much technology, such as gadgets, are for users who love their coolness as much as what they accomplish. But, for lawyers who need to keep and bill their time in six-minute increments, such technological advancements are more like steps backward. Somehow, priorities like streamlining the burden of timekeeping and billing have been displaced in favor of, for example, properly tagging and uploading documents in the firm's document management system. Perhaps if we can beer talk about issues like these, we can once again read from the same hymnal. P2P Feel Our Pain: Start with where aorneys are and how we got here. For the increasingly thin cohort of lawyers who did not begin their careers aer everyone became computer literate (AD or Aer Dial-Up), law firms abounded with secretaries whose job it was to type your documents, keep your calendar and retrieve the briefcase you le under the table of the restaurant where you had lunch. While that might not seem like the good old days compared to the age of the smartphone, it should be appreciated how much clerical work has moved to aorneys in the form of managing email and documents on our PCs (not to mention billing systems). This might not be so bad for the new generation of legal professionals. But it rarely feels to more senior aorneys that information systems are evaluated based on how much time and effort they demand of the professionals whose lives they are supposed to make easier. There Are No Solutions, Only Successful Experiments: The good news is there is a dizzying array of technologies and tools available to the legal profession. The bad news is that many still require lockstep conformity by users who are supposed to abandon how they might work now in favor of the new method or practice required by the system. It's easy to think of the goal of IT systems as geing everyone to do the right thing, such as uploading their documents wherever they are supposed to go. A beer way to think about such things, however, might be like new products, which are judged unsuccessful in the marketplace if nobody uses them. The goal should be people clamoring for the new tool or system like rabid fans lining up for the new iPhone, not taxpayers receiving the new Form 1040. Accommodating Individual Work Styles Won't Create Chaos: While there's no formula for successful technology deployments, there is one sure-fire way for things to go wrong: Try telling everyone how to use their PCs. One of the challenges of being right when it comes to technology is that it's so difficult to avoid thinking that everyone who disagrees is, well, wrong. Maybe some things really should be pushed top- down, such as password strength for remote access, but this needn't be the model for everything. For example, KEVIN HARRANG Kevin Harrang is co-founder of MetaJure, a technology company that believes software should do all the work of organizing and finding your documents for you. Formerly deputy general counsel for Microsoft Corporation, he now serves on various nonprofit boards, lectures at the University of Washington Law School and is a volunteer attorney for the Eastside Legal Assistance Program in Bellevue, Washington. Contact Kevin at kevin@metajure.com.

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