Technophobes Beware

Technophobes Beware

The staid legal profession needs to overcome an aversion to devices that can make work easier.

By Francis X. Gilpin

Associate Editor

Before attorneys decide to upgrade their office technology, they have to want to do it. Tampa Bay area information-management system vendors, including one who is a lawyer, say they find that desire absent at many local law firms.

"Oh, my goodness," says Deborah C. Foster, president of InTouch Business Consultants Inc., Seminole. "If we could just get them in the '90s, we'd be happy."

Kevin M. Makar says law firms are among the most resistant of his clients to concepts such as a paper-less office. "They're so paper-bound," says Makar, president of Aridine Inc., Wesley Chapel. "They're afraid to move forward into the electronic era."

Fortunately for companies like InTouch, which serves only law offices, there are early adopters. They're the legal profession's equivalent of the neighbor down the street who had to be the first on the block to hang a plasma screen television on his wall.

IT vendors for law firms say they're not just pushing high-tech snobbery. The early adopters, says Makar, are "people who understand that technology will catapult them forward and business-enable them to be able to actually get ahead of the competition."

A good way to stay back in the pack is for a law firm to continue doing things like using Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 98 operating system for personal computing, as 2005 fast approaches.

Although Windows 98 is one of the most unstable PC desktop operating systems ever unleashed on the global market, between 15% and 20% of local law firms that have hired InTouch are still using it.

"If you're running Windows 98 and you've got 10 support staff, it's a guarantee that they reboot their computers three times a day," says Foster. "That's a 10-minute process. That's 30 minutes a day for every legal assistant, where they're not productive. Then, they're complaining about how crappy their computer is. So you have to tack on some unproductive time [for that]. And then they don't like their job because it's not any fun when your hammer doesn't work and that's the only hammer they have. If all you use is a hammer all day long and your hammer doesn't work, you're not in a good mood and you don't want to come to work. "

Scott Bassett, a former Michigan divorce lawyer who moved to Bradenton in 2002 to work for InTouch, recommends Windows XP Pro as the operating system for law firms. "It took 18 years for Microsoft to get it right with a desktop operating system," says Bassett. "But, when they did, they did a good job."

The next problem is often that the legal staff is still using Corel Corp.'s Word Perfect word-processing application instead of Microsoft's ubiquitous Word program.

"In almost every other industry, Word has been the dominant word-processing program for at least the last five years, if not longer," says Bassett. "The legal market has been slow to shift from Word Perfect to Word."

Corel, a cash-hemorrhaging Canadian company now owned by a San Francisco venture capital firm, just came out with a new version of its office productivity suite called Word Perfect Office 12. But most law firms have hung onto WP 9, which Bassett says cannot open documents created with Word XP or Word 2003.

The casual user might not see much that separates Word from Word Perfect, says Bassett. But there are differences when it comes to the advanced features most often used by legal office workers, such as creating tables of contents or cross-referencing footnotes.

So InTouch offers monthly instructional sessions at the Clearwater and St. Petersburg bar associations for legal office employees who are making the transition out of what Bassett disparages as "antique junk."

Foster says her company frequently has to retrain legal employees to work smarter and more efficiently. "You can always improve on the way that you're doing things," she says. "No firm should be dependent on a person and a piece of software."

The constant joke with Foster is that lawyers are accidentally successful. "They just so happen to have enough money at the end of the month to pay their bills," she says. "But they don't know how they got the money or how they could get more money.

"We like to go in and really just step back and say: 'You're a lawyer and you're a great lawyer. Now let's make your business run like a well-oiled machine.'"

Foster says every successful law firm has six software needs: Practice management; time billing and accounting; document management; document assembly; a suite of productivity applications; and a package for each specialty of the firm, such as bankruptcy or real estate law.

She says InTouch has evaluated every software product on the market, chosen the best in each category, and that's the one her company installs for clients.

The biggest obstacle among the clerical staffers is their ingrained work habits. The biggest obstacle among firm partners is the sticker shock.

"The technology end of it is the easy part. That's just computers and software and cabling," says Bassett. "It's trying to get people to think about the way they do their jobs a little differently."

After carefully studying work-flow patterns, Foster says she might hand in a 16-page proposal. Almost invariably, she says, the senior partner will flip to the back page and exclaim: "Twenty-one thousand dollars! Are you kidding me?"

Makar says he doesn't encounter as much resistance to price. Unlike InTouch, Aridine doesn't exclusively market to lawyers. But Makar estimates that fewer than five law firms have rejected his quotes out of the perhaps 30 to 40 that he has dealt with.

Aridine focuses on imaging technology and Makar, a software engineer, has developed his own document-management system called Infusion. He says his company charges between $5,000 and $10,000 to set up Infusion in a law office that has 10 computer users.

Over a year, according to Makar, a firm that has twice as many employees as that will save between $75,000 and $125,000 by adopting his Web-based system.

Those kind of numbers tend to get the attention of even the most parsimonious managing partner.

"They don't have to continually keep asking the secretaries or whatever to pull up documents or go pull folders," says Makar. "They pull them right up themselves. The neat part is, if they're on the Internet and they Internet-enable it, they can do it from anywhere, including the courthouse."