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I wouldn't conflate fancy with sophisticated. Law firms are structurally insulated from market demands and are highly inefficient. They will often just throw pe

I wouldn't conflate fancy with sophisticated. Law firms are structurally insulated from market demands and are highly inefficient. They will often just throw people at problems better solved by technology and then pass those costs on to clients. There are a number of reasons for the lack of adoption: - Almost all firms are LLPs where revenue is passed through to the partners. Investing in technology would take a direct cut out of that, and so even if it would make things more efficient, the partners would rather just make more money. - Most lawyers bill by the hour. There is a disincentive to invest in technology at any area in the firm which would reduce the number of hours billed. Sure you can cut a fixed price deal, but that is a rarity. The places where law firms have invested in tech (e.g. search tools for e-discovery) are because it would be totally inexcusable to spend that much time on a problem or the clients demand it. For example, I have heard of law firms refusing to work with Dropbox or other cloud storage services, but that is very slowly starting to change. - Law has been an industry that has been historically slow to adopt any technology, whether it be word processing in 80s, email in the 90s, or now automation. There are a number of reasons for this, from lawyers being in a very hierarchial practice where the partner determines the process and may not be tech saavy to lawyers in general being quite risk averse in order to avoid ethical issues. That industry regulation warps competitive forces just makes this more of a problem. Many law firms are silo'd under partners where the process and the tools used can vary widely.

rayiner 9y ago
That sounds to me like a description of what being a lawyer was like in the 1980s. Today, you don’t get cases by calling up a golfing buddy. You go pitch cases to sophisticated clients who compare your proposal with 4-5 other firms’. Alternative fee arrangements account for almost 20% of revenue and growing, and that doesn’t include soft-caps and write-offs that lead to realization being around 85%. I don’t buy that there is all this great technology out there that law firms aren’t using. There are differences driven by practical requirements for sure. For example, I don’t approve of the cloud, because who owns the hard drive your data sits on is a fact with legal significance. Most people can afford to ignore the difference; lawyers cannot. But it’s not like they eschew remote access to data. Things like RDS and VPN let you access data remotely while controlling ownership of the hard drive where it resides.
- sah2ed 9y ago
  How about paying a one-time fee with a little extra to be regarded as the legal owner of a set of mirrored HDDs installed at a facility that provides predominantly cloud-based infrastructure? Would that solve the ownership problem that would prevent lawyers from considering cloud storage?

rayiner 9y ago

That sounds to me like a description of what being a lawyer was like in the 1980s. Today, you don’t get cases by calling up a golfing buddy. You go pitch cases to sophisticated clients who compare your proposal with 4-5 other firms’. Alternative fee arrangements account for almost 20% of revenue and growing, and that doesn’t include soft-caps and write-offs that lead to realization being around 85%. I don’t buy that there is all this great technology out there that law firms aren’t using. There are differences driven by practical requirements for sure. For example, I don’t approve of the cloud, because who owns the hard drive your data sits on is a fact with legal significance. Most people can afford to ignore the difference; lawyers cannot. But it’s not like they eschew remote access to data. Things like RDS and VPN let you access data remotely while controlling ownership of the hard drive where it resides.

sah2ed 9y ago
How about paying a one-time fee with a little extra to be regarded as the legal owner of a set of mirrored HDDs installed at a facility that provides predominantly cloud-based infrastructure? Would that solve the ownership problem that would prevent lawyers from considering cloud storage?