By: Dan Costello
At the heart of town, there is a law firm with a marble fountain in its lobby that now sits silent, motionless and dry. The corner offices where attorneys once sat behind solid mahogany doors, looking down on the city and billing, always billing, are empty. The bullpen is eerily still. Turning off the lights for the last time and closing the heavy glass doors behind him, an aged attorney wonders to himself how it all came apart. One by one, clients left for faster leaner and more efficient competitors… firms he was too big, too slow and too expensive to compete with. He didn’t stand a chance.
According to a 2011 survey commissioned by the Council on Litigation Management, the overwhelming majority of carriers listed “faster resolution” as their top area where their existing counsel needed improvement. Respondents wanted their attorneys to “use their experience” to spend “less time in discovery” and “move cases more quickly.” But, these same carriers said that when it comes to achieving faster resolution through improved efficiency, only about 40% of firms “get it.”
Around the country, attorneys are facing the cold harsh truth that the legal profession is a marketplace. Attorneys are incentivized to treat every motion, contract, and memorandum like arcane texts that only a person with a legal degree and years of experience could ever hope to produce. This mentality is lucrative. To many senior attorneys, delegating this work to young associates, paralegals and *gasp* law clerks seems at-best like a missed opportunity to bill. While the lawyer who handles every task himself can achieve a high level of quality, they sacrifice volume, reproducibility and value, things that the current market demands. No client wants to hear that their litigation is dragging on needlessly because their attorney is spending too much time on someone else’s case. Most importantly, no client wants to hear that they paid more than they needed to for services because their attorney was doing tasks that could have been performed by an associate or paralegal. Yet this is the norm for many law firm across the country.
Now, imagine a law firm where, with a simple cue from an attorney, a team of paralegals, law clerks, and support staff begin drafting interrogatories, preparing subpoenas, and issuing discovery. This firm is fast. Everyone works from templates and standardized documents - tweaking and modifying them to suit the needs of the supervising attorney. Everyone uploads their work to the digital cloud for the supervising attorney to review electronically. And, no one needs to be in the same office, the same time zone, or even the same country. This law firm repeats success; it keeps an electronic library of every motion is has ever drafted. When that same attorney needs a motion, she directs her paralegal to motions covering similar issues and dealing with similar facts. Pulling from those motions, the paralegal crafts a brand new motion. The motion is reviewed, revised and filed 100% electronically. Successful motions and pleadings are incorporated into the firm’s knowledge base, while unsuccessful ones are not. And, because this firm is fast, the entire process takes a fraction of the time required by a traditional firm. Our firm understands value, keeping quality high and costs low. Systems are put in place to ensure that every piece of work product is reviewed by a supervising attorney. Routine processes are made near-automatic. With every case, the whole firm becomes smarter, faster and more efficient. At our firm, success is now repeatable. And our firm’s the most valuable resources, its attorneys, are freed up to focus on the tasks most critical to resolving cases for the client. Firms stuck in the old model really don’t stand a chance.
