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"Generally speaking, legal practice is fairly inefficient and anti-technological. My cofounders and I are not the first to notice; there is a veritable graveyar

"Generally speaking, legal practice is fairly inefficient and anti-technological. My cofounders and I are not the first to notice; there is a veritable graveyard of failed legal technology companies." The issue, in my opinion, is that law firms have a direct incentive to be inefficient and bill more hours. Why would a firm invest in time-saving technology when it will literally mean sending smaller bills to clients? The firm would have to raise their rates or work even harder to drum up business in order to maintain revenue. This is a really unfortunate situation, but it's reality. I hope Amicus Labs has a strategy to address this.

rayiner 14y ago
To be fair, the author is a fresh law school graduate. What does he know about whether legal practice is inefficient or not? I was a summer associate at a large New York law firm, and the level of technology was fairly typical for corporate America. We had a centralized document management system that integrated version control and generation of deltas. We had a centralized, searchable repository of every document generated for every client, which we could use to avoid duplicating effort when doing new work. We did everything via Blackberry e-mail and Outlook calendaring. Beyond the generic "you can always have better document management" I'm not sure what else there was to do. The major legal research databases (Westlaw and Nexis) have god-awful interfaces, but there isn't much law firms can do about that, since there is a huge barrier to entry in that market (the proprietary databases). The fundamental problem is that nearly everything you do for a client is a one-off. It's 90% similar to what you've done for a previous client, but that remaining 10% is not very amenable to technological automation. Can you write some software that will cross-reference an SEC disclosure against the client's big pile of haphazardly-assembled internal documentation, which are handed over in God-knows how many formats? If so, then you're going to make some serious money. If not, then well that's how that graveyard of failed legal technology companies builds up. The big recent advance in legal technology has been software to speed up document review, which leverages document search technology that has really improved (and obsoleted a large number of discovery attorneys in the process). Law firms have been quick to embrace such software, as well as services such as "in-sourced" discovery centers in places like West Virginia. To date, legal technology hasn't advanced much beyond that, largely because computer technology for working with documents hasn't evolved much beyond search.
sage_joch 14y ago
Law firms also have a direct incentive to win. Working more efficiently doesn't necessarily mean you have to work fewer hours. It just means you can get more done in the hours you do work.
Osiris 14y ago
In a previous job I worked for a firm that provided services to law firms and I can say that your assumption is missing some important information. Law firms actually do spend quite a bit on technology to improve their practices. Many cases these days include so much documentation provided during the discovery phase that it's very difficult to process. Some of the technologies that I personally oversaw implemented at law firms include, 1) document scanning and indexing, 2) electronic document conversion, 3) native file metadata extraction and indexing, 4) document culling (filtering large document sets based on metadata and extracted keywords), 5) document review (to find document relevant to the case), 7) electronic searching of legal records (like Lexis-Nexis), 7) fax servers (true, law firms use a LOT of fax) While I agree that there are areas in which law firm technology can be improved, there is a fairly healthy market for software solutions to improve productivity at law firms (though much is aimed more at secretaries and paralegals than attorneys).

rayiner 14y ago

To be fair, the author is a fresh law school graduate. What does he know about whether legal practice is inefficient or not? I was a summer associate at a large New York law firm, and the level of technology was fairly typical for corporate America. We had a centralized document management system that integrated version control and generation of deltas. We had a centralized, searchable repository of every document generated for every client, which we could use to avoid duplicating effort when doing new work. We did everything via Blackberry e-mail and Outlook calendaring. Beyond the generic "you can always have better document management" I'm not sure what else there was to do. The major legal research databases (Westlaw and Nexis) have god-awful interfaces, but there isn't much law firms can do about that, since there is a huge barrier to entry in that market (the proprietary databases). The fundamental problem is that nearly everything you do for a client is a one-off. It's 90% similar to what you've done for a previous client, but that remaining 10% is not very amenable to technological automation. Can you write some software that will cross-reference an SEC disclosure against the client's big pile of haphazardly-assembled internal documentation, which are handed over in God-knows how many formats? If so, then you're going to make some serious money. If not, then well that's how that graveyard of failed legal technology companies builds up. The big recent advance in legal technology has been software to speed up document review, which leverages document search technology that has really improved (and obsoleted a large number of discovery attorneys in the process). Law firms have been quick to embrace such software, as well as services such as "in-sourced" discovery centers in places like West Virginia. To date, legal technology hasn't advanced much beyond that, largely because computer technology for working with documents hasn't evolved much beyond search.

sage_joch 14y ago

Law firms also have a direct incentive to win. Working more efficiently doesn't necessarily mean you have to work fewer hours. It just means you can get more done in the hours you do work.

Osiris 14y ago

In a previous job I worked for a firm that provided services to law firms and I can say that your assumption is missing some important information. Law firms actually do spend quite a bit on technology to improve their practices. Many cases these days include so much documentation provided during the discovery phase that it's very difficult to process. Some of the technologies that I personally oversaw implemented at law firms include, 1) document scanning and indexing, 2) electronic document conversion, 3) native file metadata extraction and indexing, 4) document culling (filtering large document sets based on metadata and extracted keywords), 5) document review (to find document relevant to the case), 7) electronic searching of legal records (like Lexis-Nexis), 7) fax servers (true, law firms use a LOT of fax) While I agree that there are areas in which law firm technology can be improved, there is a fairly healthy market for software solutions to improve productivity at law firms (though much is aimed more at secretaries and paralegals than attorneys).