The Importance of Technology Training in Legal Organizations

the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.

Peter Drucker. The Essential Drucker.

Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a [legal organization] can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your [organization]. Let’s count on three hours preparation for each hour of course time—twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in [the trainees’] performance, your [organization] will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of twelve hours.

Andy Grove. “Chapter 16: Why Training Is The Boss’s Job.” High Output Management

As an educator, I fear world-class [law schools] and high-performance [legal organizations] overinvest in “education” and dramatically underinvest in “training.” Human capital champions in higher education and industry typically prize knowledge over skills. Crassly put, leaders and managers get knowledge and education while training and skills go to those who do the work. That business bias is both dangerous and counterproductive.

Michael Schrage. “How the Navy SEALs Train for Leadership Excellence.” Harvard Business Review.

Technology is now as important a skill as are reading, writing, and mathematics. Everyone [including lawyers] needs to be able to use computers, search for information on the Internet, use word processors and spreadsheets, and download apps. These skills are now common and useful in every profession [including law].

Vivek Wadha. “Love of Learning Is the Key to Success in the Jobless Future.” Washington Post.

This imbalance in technological growth will have some surprising implications. For instance, workers more and more will come to be classified into two categories. The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer?

Tyler Cowen. Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation.

Turning Andy Grove’s point above into something more visual, here is a chart that translates productivity gains into full-time equivalents (FTE) at scale:

The common trap is make the purchase, flip the switch, and, BAM!, reap the productivity gains. After all, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But sobering studies out of MIT find that for every dollar spent on new technology, enterprises must invest an additional ten dollars in organizational capital—training and process redesign—to capture the technology’s full benefits. Again, for every $1 spent on technology, you need to invest $10 in training and process.

Because people need to be trained and workflows need to be redesigned, related studies find that it typically requires five to seven years for an enterprise to properly integrate new technology. Without the complementary investment of time and resources, the technology only partially fulfills its promise, if at all. As a result, we have plenty of existing technology not being used anywhere close to full potential. As Greg and I have observed, much of that latent technology capacity has been sitting on lawyers’ desktops for over two decades. Training on already-purchased technology can, in many instances, be more cost effective than purchasing new technology (though not always, sometimes the already-purchased technology is terrible, or the new technology is awesome).

The Ethical Case for Technology Training

Even states that have not yet followed the ABA in changing their rules of professional conduct to expressly reference “technology” are recognizing the necessity of technology for the practice of law: “Legal rules and procedures, when placed alongside ever-changing technology, produce professional challenges that attorneys must meet to remain competent.”

There is, of course, the cost component. Lawyers should not be charging their clients for two hours of labor when proper use of an available machine could reduce that labor to two minutes. Not knowing that technology could substitute for labor and, as a result, overcharging the client is a violation of a lawyer’s evolving ethical duty of competence.

But proper use of technology is about so much more than speed and cost. As I show in this rather simple video, not only does the failure to use simple features like automated numbering and cross-references add hours of unnecessary labor, but it also multiplies the opportunities for error by several orders of magnitude. Machines are better suited for the mind-numbing, drudgerous, laborious, and the tedious. They don’t get bored, tired, distracted, or bitter. Our work product should get better, not just cheaper, when we use technology properly. But incorporating technology requires training.

The Happiness Case for Technology Training and the Myth of the Digital Native

Lawyers will, of course, do the monotonous, banal, tiresome, and mundane whenever necessary. The idea of the “law factory” where younger lawyers “grind out standardized legal advice, documents, and services” is older and more prestigious than most practitioners recognize. But the extent to which lawyers are grinding has grown to the point where Vault is compelled to rate legal employers on whether they actually give their young attorneys substantive work. It should be unsurprising to anyone who has ever been a young lawyers, or around them, that associate attorney is, by far, the unhappiest job in America: