P2P

55 I L T A N E T . O R G H ere's a foundational question for you – has the way the legal industry works really changed that much over the past two years? Sure, many of us have invested in some home office comforts. And a bunch of us learned that we don't need to print as many documents as previously seemed a necessity. And some of us have been lucky enough to get some new schedule flexibility. But has the way we do the work of legal changed? According to a recent report commissioned by ContractWorks titled "2022 In-House Legal Tech Report: How the Pandemic helped shape a Legal Tech revolution," 65% of in-house legal teams want to work remotely at least part of the time, but more than 45% are already back in the office full-time. And an American Lawyer survey found roughly the same pattern within BigLaw – about 60% of respondents said their firms were asking for three days per week of in-office work. The last two years have proven that many roles can be effectively done while away from the office most of the time. So why the rush back to the office in legal? We've not found an effective way to develop and maintain culture through technology. We've not historically been a collaborative industry. Let's not be too harsh on ourselves – legal has never been the most collaborative of industries. Lawyers check documents out from the document management system and write them alone. Lit support professionals build databases alone. Reviews are a one-human job. We read contracts alone. We research alone. At best, legal has traditionally been a Henry Ford assembly line where each person does their specialized part of the process to deliver the desired outcome. While this might seem a harsh statement of reality, it's not meant to be. Every industry grows, evolves, and changes over time. The assembly line took us pretty far. But we only make it to the next level by working together… collaboratively. I know, I know. We rolled out Microsoft Teams during the pandemic. We all started texting our professional colleagues as much as our family and friends. And we foundationally changed our position on putting some data in the cloud. We even started hosting themed Zoom calls. But that's not collaboration, that's communication. Think of it this way, when you communicate, you transfer information from one to another. Collaboration, then, is more about when and where you work together – whether in the office, from home, or after hours. It's time for a different approach. "If they try to get me back in the office [,] I will 100% leave." According to the same American Lawyer survey on returning to the office, this was the prevailing mood as described by a BigLaw associate. And while it would be easy to lay the clear desire for remote work at the feet the younger generations, the fact is that parents, introverts, and many other groups have found remote work beneficial to their quality of life. Whether that means being able to pick up and drop the kids off at school or having the freedom to work in an environment that's most conducive to your personal work style, offering the autonomy to be a human as well as an employee is already impacting satisfaction and retention within legal. Effective collaboration will be central to re- imagining culture and mentorship in our new hybrid world. So why hasn't adopting technology to support electronic forms of collaboration been more successful in legal? In many cases, this failure comes from a well- intentioned, but shortsighted approach to tech. Namely, we should be choosing tech that aligns to the way our professionals enjoy working today, and slowly guide them towards new ways of working.

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