If you’ve ever watched one of the many legal dramas out there – think Boston Legal, Suits and The Good Wife, to name a few – you’ll probably have witnessed a scene (or several) where the show’s hot-shot lawyer is struggling with a big case. Typically, he or she enlists the help of a lowly paralegal to sift through reams and reams of case law to find previous judicial decisions, called precedents, to support or further their argument. Then follow scenes of this lowly underling pouring over piles and piles of documents and books well into the night in a massive library in the hope of uncovering the single piece of information they need to win the case.
Norton Rose Fulbright still has a physical library, but it’s a lot smaller than it used to be, says Nerushka Bowan, a technology and privacy lawyer at Norton Rose Fulbright (NRF). “Nowadays, very few people actually go into the library because we’ve moved on from doing our legal research that way. We now have the information we need at our fingertips. If we're looking for a specific case or a particular precedent, we can just go onto a digital system, type in a keyword and the information pops up.”
Gone are the days when lawyers just did the work and then presented the client with a huge bill at the end.
Maurae Wooding, Norton Rose Fulbright
According to Bowan, this change represents modern law firms’ efforts to focus their attention on harnessing the data they have within their businesses more effectively. “Historically, with law firms, information was siloed and difficult to access. Now, there's a real drive to get as much insight as possible from the data we have because we have very valuable data within our business.”
But she’s quick to mention that this trend doesn’t mean that technology will replace lawyers entirely. “Obviously, there have been headlines that lawyers will be out of jobs and robots will take over and all sorts of things. I don’t think this is the case. I do think, however, that lawyers need to upskill themselves to understand the benefits of technology, and how they can harness it to improve their current work and output and create greater efficiencies for their clients at the end of the day.”
The power of the pivot
Around the end of 2019, NRF embarked on a global modernisation and simplification journey, says Maurae Wooding, CIO at Norton Rose Fulbright South Africa. A five-year strategic roadmap was created, the aim of which was to enable the firm for the new norm, reduce complexity and deliver better value for spend and gearing up the business for future growth. The firm wanted to do all this while increasing security and without having a negative impact on the user experience. Developing this strategy demanded that Wooding and her colleagues talk to the lawyers working at the firm about the solutions they needed to make their jobs easier. “Typically, I believe that one of the big problems is that IT tends to deploy what it thinks the lawyers need and want without actually asking them what they need and want. They focus on what they know to be ‘cool’ technology. But the driver should be around what the lawyers require to be more productive, more profitable and more professional. Getting this right comes down to asking the right questions and talking to the partners about business needs, not IT needs.”
Wooding explains that the roadmap was divided up into different years, which enabled the team to work out the cost around what technologies were needed and make sure that technology isn’t the limiting factor in allowing users to be productive and work according to their life choices. Luckily, this meant that when Covid hit, they were ready to take their teams remote. Well, kind of ready.
As part of this roadmap, the firm decided to go with Microsoft Teams as its primary business communication platform. “We had just begun with the project plans and started having deployment discussions when lockdown hit and we quickly realised that we couldn’t do everything we needed to do to get Teams up and running in time. This was a big project that would take months and we needed a solution urgently.”
Within three weeks, a deal was signed with Zoom and it was rolled out across the firm. “But we didn’t stop what we were doing with Teams. We carried on working on this project in the background while we were using Zoom.”
She shares this story because it demonstrates how important it is for IT to be agile and comfortable with adapting the plan as and when things change.
Today, the firm fully uses Teams as part of the drive to simplify and standardise the technology stack. “You don’t want multiple vendors and integrations if you can avoid it. We’re always looking for a complete solution that brings together all the capabilities we need,” says Wooding.
That said, the firm hasn’t abandoned Zoom. It still has some Zoom licences for connecting with specific clients and for certain scenarios. Making the move from the one to the other – Zoom to Teams – had to be conducted quite strategically, she says. “We needed to give users an overview of the new product and then set up short, daily sessions for about three months, where we covered small bites of information about the platform and made ourselves available to answer any of their questions. It really worked well.”
What must be remembered is that lawyers sell time, she says, so the firm couldn’t afford for the change management processes around this deployment to waste anyone’s time.
Today, clients are putting increased pressure on law firms to only pay fees for what they feel the outcome is worth. “Gone are the days when lawyers just did the work and then presented the client with a huge bill at the end. Clients want visibility and they want to know exactly what they’re paying for,” says Wooding.
In automating many of the more manual processes and making collaboration and communication easier, these bright legal minds are only charging clients for the time they spend doing work that really adds value. “If you look across industries, digital transformation is affecting everyone,” says Bowan. “If lawyers think it doesn’t affect their firm, they will be left behind. If you’re not keeping up to speed with your clients’ needs, why should your clients keep coming back to you?”
* Article first published on brainstorm.itweb.co.za
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