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70 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 encourages forward-looking lawyers to look at using technolo more effectively. Businesses are certainly digitizing but there are many other external factors that are driving the rapid implementation of technolo in the legal sector including the following: • Increasing importance and volume of data • Emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning • Massive changes to financial systems • Increased use of Microsoft Office 365 • More comfortable storing documents securely in the cloud Maybe the processes used by the legal profession make it unique Legal professionals are finding it more critical to improve efficiency, productivity and time-management. Lawyers have always created a lot of documents. At the end of the day this represents their "work." How they create, manage and store these documents (including email) is therefore critical. The utilization of time (and recording it) is how they get paid. That means it's critical to keep the time tracking and billing system running efficiently. Collaboration with clients has always been important. Working together is critical when project timeframes continue to shorten. Clients are therefore asking their law firms to use new technologies to help them collaborate more effectively. Some even suggest that lawyers are a bit different from the rest of us. People who work in the legal profession appear to be a bit more resistant to change than in other industries. What evidence is there that lawyers are comfortable maintaining the status quo? Here are a few points raised by the 'Technolo Adoption' session panel: • Use of technolo for many is very limited with some only using Word and Outlook • Often have limited management training and spend very little time developing their leadership skills • Some lack commercial awareness plus it's not their money they're spending • Suspicious of change so always need to understand 'why' and what the impact will be In the 'New to Legal' workshop, Andrew Dey used various personality profiling studies, including Larry Richard's study of ABA-member lawyers using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and his article on www.lawyerbrain.com to show how lawyers score against certain personality traits. Dey said legal folks tend to rate 'high' for skepticism, urgency, abstract reasoning and autonomy and 'low' in sociability and personal resilience. Another member of the workshop panel (a lawyer) suggested, "Lawyers are insecure, overachievers, who need to be reassured that their legal expertise will not be threatened by using technolo." In the past, partnership models didn't always encourage change and partners weren't regularly held to account on profitability. But that's clearly changing; partners are much more business-oriented today. So, what are the key takeaways? The message I heard time and time again at the conference was that in order for technolo to be adopted by lawyers, it needs to solve a problem they recognize, and deliver benefits … quickly. They need to know how long it will take to make or save money and what's at risk if they don't make the change. However, in order to solve the big challenges, F E A T U R E S

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