> But even with today’s modern communication tools, both customer experience and lawyer workflow have remained stagnant.
At a large firm, legal practice is unrecognizable compared to even 10-15 years ago. Everything is electronic: filing and docketing, document collection/scanning/OCR, legal research, document management (DMS + version control). Everyone communicates almost exclusively via e-mail, and remote work facilities are ubiquitous.
To the extent that technology is available that's not getting adopted, it's because it's not good enough. Predictive coding can be very helpful, but it also has a fixed setup and training overhead that makes it less efficient for smaller matters. That's why arguably the biggest shift in discovery in the last 15 years hasn't been to automating it, but outsourcing it to contract lawyers.
In the area of research, Westlaw and Lexis still rule because of their completeness and accuracy. If I need a copy of some statute enacted in 1873 I can not only find it, but I can get original scans so I can verify the text is free of OCR errors.
Moreover, things that are easy on the rest of the web are not easy when it comes to legal (or scientific) research. PageRank, for example, works great when everyone searching for "skiing near Tahoe" is looking for the same popular pages. But when you're doing legal research, a lower-court case that directly addresses your issue but isn't widely cited is much more valuable than a highly-cited Supreme Court case that doesn't address your issue. And computers still don't really understand either what issue you're looking for or what issue a case is about. So ancient technology (search for this word near that word) still rules the day.
> There are good reasons for this, as law firms tend to be cost agonistic (since they pass costs directly to their client)
This is oft-stated, but economically fallacious. Price is a function of supply and demand. The client cares about total cost for a particular legal service; she doesn't care about how that cost is broken down. If the client's budget for a matter is $300,000, every dollar that goes to costs is a dollar that doesn't go to the law firm. This is true even if you're billing by the hour, because in the long run, a firm will raise rates until hours x rate = client budget.