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Legal technology waits for no lawyer. Attorneys can duck the march of technology here and there based on their role or scope of practice, but over a long enough timeline, the tools designed to make law more efficient will catch up to every practitioner.
The State of Corporate Litigation Today, a joint study from the Association of Corporate Counsel and Everlaw, came out today and unsurprisingly, legal tech has come for the in-house lawyers.
Law departments aren’t strangers to technology, of course, but after years of technology focusing on helping firms or ALSPs deliver efficiently for clients, the new frontier for tech is in-house.
This tracks the lessons of this year’s CLOC conference, where operations professionals within the law department descended on Vegas to get deep into expediting the contract management process. Law department leadership apparently sees the importance of adopting tech beyond just getting deals done.
And the trend of bringing more work in-house is a big reason in-house lawyers care more about tech right now. The solutions they used to gleefully outsource to law firms need to get in the hands of department lawyers.
Still, tech adoption is stubbornly slow in this sector.
“In one of the more surprising findings of the survey, tech prowess ranked as the top next-gen skill for in-house counsel,” said Blake Garcia, senior director of business intelligence at ACC. ”Large-scale implementation of legal technology has been slower than anticipated due to a number of factors, However, we continue to see evidence like this that legal innovation continues to gain momentum by increasing efficiencies and lowering costs – impacting law departments’ work flows and hiring practices in the years ahead.”
This disconnect between the commitment to getting more tech savvy and the slow pace of tech adoption permeates the exhibit hall at the ACC Annual Meeting.
Everything in this room seems just a bit more subdued than the CLOC gathering. Richard Cohen, managing director at Protiviti and an experienced general counsel, told me he thought the issue is that law department leadership in 2022 are focused on the stuff they have to do as opposed to what they could be doing. While CLOC’s membership fixates on getting deals done faster and more efficiently, ACC attendees bear the weight of protecting the company too and there’s a lot more chatter about dealing with the public disclosures than investing in a product to revolutionize the department. According to the report, while 85 percent may think tech is important, only 56 percent saw their tech needs increasing over the next year.
But something’s got to give soon. In-house teams can’t keep taking on more and more traditional law firm tasks without pulling the trigger and investing in the tools firms have come to rely upon. At a certain point, it’s not cheaper to bring the task inside if the department lacks the tools to get the job done.
The study suggests general counsel understand this… but maybe they just don’t know as though the people approving their budget have caught on yet.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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