WHY DID LAW FIRMS HATE PRACTICE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE?

August 7, 2020

5 min read

A Law Firm Management oriented examination of legal practice during a pandemic.

Over the course of four days in April—at the height of the lockdown—we surveyed lawyers in Nigeria about practicing during a lockdown. We sought to benchmark the where, who, why and how of working from home in the Nigerian legal industry. The survey questions sought to determine the practice areas, occupational positions and typical responsibilities of the respondents on one hand as well as their means of effectuation and the challenges that they experienced while performing legal work from a home instead of an office.

The results were very revelatory of the operational issues that were plaguing law firms at the time. Issues ranged from an inability to effect physical meetings and attend court sessions through a lack of opportunities for generating new business to social, familial and other distractions. Law firms also struggled with maintaining the dividing line between business and non-business hours; determining on whom the onus for providing internet access and electricity lay; and gaining access to case files and paper-based research enablers—textbooks, journals, state laws etc.

Expectedly the working from home issue a lawyer was having depended on his role at his firm. For instance, while senior associates and law firm leaders worried about business development opportunities and business continuity measures; providing internet access and research enablers to their employees, entry level, junior and mid-level associates worried about a lack of access to courts and other government institutions. They were concerned about social, familial and media distractions and the blurring of the lines between working and non-working hours. They were also worried about their salaries.

The major issue troubling the respondents to our survey however was their inability to access case files and paper-based research enablers; textbooks, journals, state laws etc. For these lawyers, this lack of access to case files and research enablers trumped their inability to physically meet with clients, visit courts and other government institutions; distractions and a loss of business development opportunities.

Solutions to these issues that were proposed by the respondents included excluding lawyers and the judiciary from the quarantine—granting legal service providers essential worker status; digitizing the court and other regulatory systems; digitizing law firm practices by scanning and uploading documents; ensuring ubiquitous location-independent access to electronic research platforms and precedent banks.

They also suggested stabilizing electricity supply and commodifying internet data. Significantly few respondents even mentioned practice management software as a possible solution to the problem of access to case files and paper-based research enablers and that bring us to the question at the origin of this newsletter; why did law firms hate practice management software?

Practice management systems are a type of legal technology tool used to digitally effect law firm management practices and aspects of the practice of law. They may be cloud-based accessed through a browser, non-cloud-based installed as a software or a hybrid of the two. Some of them are designed to service the full breadth of a law firm and enable the management of production (legal), financial and business side affairs, others service specific aspects of law firm management.

Speaking very expansively, a good practice management system should serve as a virtual office. It should hold practice and client information, house copies of internal and external communications, have a dashboard that showcases at-a-glance statistics of the vital signs of the business and house the firm’s files and documents. It should have a calendar that empowers task and event scheduling and tracking. It should also be equipped with a count-up timer for tracking billable time and should be able to perform foundational aspects of accounting like billing, expense recording and invoicing.

Some practice management systems support document creation and assembly—they have word editor programmes that support document creation, formatting, sharing and archiving. Some of these editors allow concurrent Google Docs-like collaboration on documents, others enable the merging of templates with data to create documents.

Practice management systems maintain ethics standards by enabling an administrator attach accessibility to specific documents, files or information to a user’s assigned role or permission level. Some of the very best practice management systems have legal-specific features like conflict checking, court rules, procedure guides, docketing and integration with sources of electronic research and precedent banks. A number are also client accessible and serve as a multi-access, client-facing online workspace.

Law firms can survive without practice management software. You likely have. Most of the benefits that accrue from using practice management systems: document, matter, firm, financial, communications, time, and schedule management can be had by using manual systems and duct-taping existing business administration services providers like Microsoft, Google, QuickBooks and Bill4Time together.

Admittedly, practice management systems have traditionally been somewhat of a hard sell—duct-taping has worked out just fine so far plus “don’t fix it if it is not broken” but, the productivity and managerial advantages you can gain from using such systems, especially in a post-COVID, circa 5G world far outweigh the benefits—no new, recurring expenses—you may think you enjoy by doing things the old way. For one, your practice will run better; case information will be available 24/7 and remotely.

Events, tasks, documents, invoices, notes, and communications will be associated directly with related matters and can be accessed anywhere at any time across devices. Most practice management systems keep logs of activities and can offer a correlated, data-centric overview of the on-goings in a law firm across matters, time entries, invoice payables, expenses, clients, tasks, events, milestones, due dates and deadlines. They often house legal-specific word editors. Time entries can be specified to tasks and attached to specific matters and invoices and online sharing features called client portals can enable your clients join the dispute resolution or brief execution process.

So why did law firms hate practice management systems? We do not have that answer but we daresay that it has been a crazy year, everything is different now.