Published Articles | Of Counsel Magazine Includes Tips from Rafte & Company in May Issue
An article by Lori Tripoli in Of Counsel's May 2007 edition tackles the sticky question of how law firms can tell when it's time for a software upgrade. Rafte & Company President Dena Rafte is quoted in the article, saying law firms that fail to include periodic upgrades in their budgets and plans are vulnerable because such a failure can send a negative message to clients. If your law firm has PCs that are operating on Windows 2000, this might be an article you'll want to pass around the office:
Are You Losing Clients Because Your Software’s Too Old? . . .
Don’t Get Caught with a 1.0 in a 5.0 World
When a lawyer at an Of Counsel 700 firm recently emailed a document to a reporter in a circa 1990s version so old it could not be opened, the thought that the publishing industry could possibly be more technologically advanced than firms in the land of the $500 billable hour elicited a bit of a giggle. The reporter was definitely feeling a glow of moral superiority (albeit, an underpaid glow) when the lawyer was compelled to send the document as an email text because nothing else would work.
Of course, if this scene had played out with a client, the result might not be so whimsical.
In fact, one lawyer, immigration attorney Angelo Paparelli, says that he was compelled to leave his big-firm practice because the firm’s technology capabilities were so antiquated. “The process of decision-making in the acquisition of technology was a very big factor in my leaving a very large firm,” says Paparelli, now the managing partner of Paparelli & Partners, which has offices in New York City and Irvine, CA. While noting that he has the highest regard for his former firm, he says that he “was representing a very large, well-known company, and that company had expectations, which were entirely reasonable, that I would communicate with them in a way that was compatible with their particular products, and I was not able to do that.
“It became an embarrassment,” Paparelli continues. “I began to make noises. I was in a branch office. The IT people decided that they would adopt the [needed] technology after all, but it would be phased in, and I was about eight months away.”
Paparelli wanted to be plugged in sooner than that, so he left. In case it’s not clear: We’re in a client-driven world, and technology is a big part of the engine.
“Law firms have always had great ways to manage the paper office, but their practices in managing electronic data are hurting, and it’s beginning to bite them,” says Dena Rafte, president of Rafte & Company, a business and technology consulting firm in Houston. “They’re in a very vulnerable position.” Around 95 percent of Rafte’s clients are law firms.
“If you look at technology 20 years ago, 15 years ago, it was driven by the staff,” Rafte observes. “It was totally an administrative task.” Then firms started buying PCs, and they’d upgrade when staff said that the computers were running too slowly. “Starting in the mid-1990s, attorneys became more involved because their hands were on the keyboard more,” Rafte says. “Now, in this generation, it’s very client-driven.”
In the Driver’s Seat
Law firms today know that effective client service delivery is critical to their success. They also realize that up-to-date technology environments and the knowledge of how to affect services delivery are critical for winning the corporate beauty contests, says Terry Crum, a New York City-based principal in the Legal Business Consulting group of the Analytic & Forensic Technology practice at Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP.
“I also believe that we are seeing a shift in thinking by leading GCs,” adds Crum. “They are beginning to realize the impact of technology on their organizations and how that use of technology can affect the productivity and effectiveness of their staffs. With that understanding, GCs are going to begin to influence what law firm’s technology usage will be,” he says.
Echoing other consultants, Crum notes that “law firms have been driving the technology usage decisions up to this point, but that will shift to the GCs. We see that change as a team approach between the law firm and the General Counsel’s office.”
Simply enough, if a lawyer sends a document by email to a client, the client should be able to open it without any hassle. “We have to be the most flexible technology organizations, particularly now,” observes Maureen Durack, director of management information systems at Vedder Price in Chicago. “We do need to anticipate that our clients will send us documents in Word, Word Perfect, in whatever version fits their needs, so our tools and techniques have to be far vaster than they were even five years ago,” Durack says. “We have to be able to handle it and make it look like it was easy.”
Which isn’t to say that law firms are actually making software purchasing and planning easy on themselves. “When you travel to various industry functions and trade shows, you find people going shopping according to a shopping list that they’ve constructed from their talks with others in the industry and from their readings,” observes John Alber, technology partner at Bryan Cave in St. Louis, MO. These buyers, he says, tend to go for whatever’s hot that year.
“There’s a lot of herd behavior and, as a consequence, a lot of wrong choices,” Alber says.
“Some law firms budget, [but] some firms buy in crisis,” Rafte observes.
Technology Equals Strategy
There’s a better way. “Take into account the firm’s strategic plans,” Alber suggests. Determine what the firm plans to do in the next two-year, five-year, ten-year periods. Is the firm going to be expanding? Contracting? Merging? Focusing on particular areas of endeavor? Will there be some particular client emphasis? Is the firm interested in expanding modes of client communication?
In terms of business, are there targeted increases in profits per partner that the firm wants to achieve? Are there changes in leverage? “It starts to become clearer what software is more important,” Alber says, as he recites these various considerations.
At some point, though, someone, whether it’s an IT person, and IT team, or a partner who’s just interested in the subject, will be pitching some new software to someone with decisionmaking ability at the firm in an effort to get the upgrade.
At this point, some firms rely on their IT people to find the best products. “I do the research and also listen to the business needs based on what I hear from the partners,” says Shari Jackowitz, director of information technology at Pryor Cashman in New York. She’ll then make recommendations based on the firm’s needs and the cost. She’ll also identify alternative products, but she provides her own recommendation of what she considers the best choice to be.
Vedder Price’s Durack sounds a similar note. “Generally, the IT group will vet products. We will spend the better part of our time looking at changes to existing products and looking at new products,” she says. For big projects, the firm will issue requests for proposals. “We rely heavily on references and proof of concepts,” Durack adds.
Others don’t hesitate to get help from consultants. “We operate on the proposition that we will regularly, out of current profits, improve the capabilities of the firm,” Paparelli says. He uses A! Consulting, whose mission is to check out everything at legal technology shows and see what might be a good fit for his firm.
“We don’t have a formal process per se, but we do follow basic procedures in acquiring software,” says Mark Wilson, senior manager of applications development and project management at Dickstein Shapiro in Washington, DC. For general, everyday software, he and his staff do some product research, learn what’s out there, narrow their options, and then get some type of vendor demonstrations.
Along the way, stakeholders have some input. For instance, Wilson says that, as his firm was considering a software application to manage its summer associate program, the director of attorney recruiting and the hiring committee were involved in the software evaluation process.
“If it’s a significant acquisition, we like to get an evaluation copy,” Wilson says. “There’s usually a big difference between what people say things can do and what they actually can do,” he notes. It’s not that those software vendors are used car salesmen trying to unload lemons. “They just don’t necessarily know the intricacies of your environment and how you’ve customized other applications,” Wilson says.
At that point, he and his staff go into a basic buy/build decision in order to determine whether they could construct a product better themselves, he explains. At that point, they’ll proceed with a formal approval process through the firm’s CIO.
Pound Foolish
Of course, bells and whistles aren’t worth anything if the lawyers don’t know how they toot. When firms “finally buy the software and implement it, you get different results,” Crum says. “However, if lawyers are unwilling to be trained on the acquired technology tools, they will never realize the full potential of their investments. In the law firm practice areas, firms are lucky if they realize 15 percent utilization. On a positive note, the administrative area is well trained and the investments are highly utilized.”
“Law firms are very reticent to send people to training,” Rafte says. Sure, the administrative folks can spare the time and have the commitment to get up to speed with the workings of new software, but the lawyers are an entirely different story.”
“The billable hour is your primary obstacle,” Wilson says. “You have to be able to show some value.” Try to “get some face time with the leaders of the practice groups that are most affected by the change and show them, if they use the software, how much better off they’ll be.
“There’s nothing worse than shelfware,” Wilson adds. Or a client who can’t open an attachment emailed from her lawyer.
—Lori Tripoli
Lori Tripoli is a freelance journalist based in Bedford, NY. She is currently working on a book on law office management. Email: LoriTripoli@hotmail.com.
