171–175 of 175 posts
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Nice writeup. Too many startups and founders out there w/ no idea about the industry. Thus, excuses of the type you mention ("sluggish, tech-averse, etc") predominate over critical evaluation of the extremely sticky and complicated obstacles to new innovations in the legal tech space. That said, as a fellow lawyer, coder, and legal toolmaker, I'd posit there's more of a middle ground than you laid out: > It's easy to…
>>long live the billable hour Such an interesting statement! What do you mean by it?
Say a new technology allows lawyers to do the same tasks in half the time it used to take them. That sounds like it rhymes with "half the pay for the same work" to me, which might account for some of the new-tech skepticism.
That's my take anyway. I suppose it's similar to the knee-jerk reflex to automation, where you're liable to 'automate yourself our of a job.'
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High end firms can easily be $800+/hr for attorneys. I believe Wilson Sonsini was $1200/hr for an attorney I was recommended.
That's high-end. Most of the time, all you need is a mid-level/independent lawyer that charges less than $400/hr or even bills on per-project basis. Cost also doesn't guarantee quality. You're paying for resources, specialization, general counsel that can delegate, and insurance against mistakes. Useful but only when you really need it.
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> Can they not be more efficient and still bill the same hours? What is stopping them from improving their internal efficiency but still pocketing the same amount of money? Generally, if you want to sell technology to lawyers, telling them they will be more efficient will not work, they are simply not motivated to spend money for something makes something they are already doing take less time. If you want to sell to…
As a counterpoint, I’d like to state that being able to raise efficiency when you need it could be a huge selling point. On slow days, I don’t want to raise my efficiency that much , I take my time and review more thorougly. But on busy days, where I bill 13+ billable hours for a week, I’d want as much efficiency as possible.
I don't think you're really talking about "efficiency" here. On slow days, you may want to spend more time to do a more thorough job, but you still wouldn't want to be less efficient.
Simple automation example: renaming files into a new format. If there was a tool that could rename a large number of files for you quickly, you would use it on slow days and busy days. There is nothing to be gained to doing it manually.
I think you're referring to tools that speed you up but sacrifice quality. That isn't a pure efficiency tool, it's tool that allows you to adjust balance your time and quality of work.
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Can they not be more efficient and still bill the same hours? What is stopping them from improving their internal efficiency but still pocketing the same amount of money?
You definitely can, most of the times you can’t collect all the hours you put in. Client pays what it pays and the rest is written off. It’s the senior’s job to manage the ratio of billed hours to collected hours. If you can and want to bill more to a client, you simply review the matter covering more depth or let the work be done by more senior lawyers who have a better hourly rate. Big-law collects all the client i…
I am telling you --from experience, not theory-- that many lawyers are resistant to time-saving tools. Not all of them, but many of them. They rarely voice out-loud that their concern is about reduced billables, and will instead make absurd arguments that the time-saving tools decrease quality.
Simple real life example: we were selling a very simple bulk download tool to a law firm. Instead of clicking a link and downloading a document many times, this tool would download many in batch and put them in a zip folder. They raised the objection saying "how do we know it downloaded everything", even though the zip file also had an excel listing all the documents that were downloaded, the source of where they came from, and any errors in downloading them.