Death and Other Inconveniences

7 min read

Retired lawyer Murray Gottheil returns with a frank, funny, and all-too-true look at what happens when lawyers leave, or die, and what legaltech should be doing to help. From disjointed systems to missing passwords, he lays out how even the best software can fall short if firms don’t rethink how they work – and what vendors build.

A senior partner died unexpectedly when I was articling. A swarm of partners descended upon his office and worked with his secretary to identify what he was working on, where each matter stood, and what had to be done to protect the clients and the firm. It was a long time ago. Computers were not on everyone’s desk yet, and there was no central document management system. Since they did not tell articling students much in those days (nothing much has changed in that regard), I could only assume that they figured it all out before moving on to identifying all of his clients and referral sources, and turning on the charm machine to try to hold onto them. 

Nowadays things are different. Everything is computerized. You would think that if a lawyer dies or retires or gets sick, or simply moves on, all of the data should be available to smoothly transition files, clients, and referral sources. You might think wrong.  

In real life, once you drill down beneath the marketing machine of a law firm, and to a greater or lesser extent depending on the firm or practice group within a firm, you will often find that law firms are collections of individual lawyers looking out for their own best interests, not particularly motivated to follow rules established by management, and under stress and not about to waste time on trivialities like policies and procedures. And so, it is not surprising that even with the best technology in the world, there will be challenges for firms to address when a lawyer suddenly leaves the firm, regardless of the reason. 

Of course, there will be the everyday frustrations of actually accessing the data, whether or not the firm has implemented a proper contingency planning protocol. It’s possible that passwords will not be up to date, information will not be entered into the computer system properly (or at all), files may have made their way onto local desktops but not into the network, there may be non-compliance with document naming and storage protocols, and other obstacles which naturally result from dealing with independent professionals who put their needs first and the firm, and sometimes the client, second. (For example, I had one partner who paid lip service to the firm policy that all precedents had to be stored in the document management system, but kept his favourites on his desktop, which meant that they were not backed up.  On the other hand, he did have the last laugh when the IT people screwed up the back-up protocol and lost all of the department’s precedents. My former partner carried on cheerfully and told himself that he was smart for ignoring the firm policies.) 

But once you get beyond all of that, what about the technology itself? Is it part of the problem or the solution? John F. Kennedy famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”  And I would like to tell the LegalTech industry, “ask not what your law firms can do for you. Ask what you can do for your law firms.” 

Now, I probably am not qualified to speak on behalf of all law firms to tell the LegalTech industry what they should do for legal professionals, but, as a public service, I am willing to give it a shot.  

I will start by describing the problem in two simple but annoying words: “artificial intelligence.”  A.I. reduces the demand for certain work traditionally performed by lawyers and drives down the amount that lawyers can charge for such work. The answer to this dilemma is two-fold.  First, lawyers have to move on from document production and other repetitive tasks to creating and implementing strategy and conducting negotiations, among other high-level tasks. Second, to the extent that lawyers stay in the document production and repetitive task game, they have to be able to do it as quickly and cheaply as everyone else. It falls to the LegalTech industry to help with the second part of the solution.  And if I can summarize my advice to them in a single, short, pithy, sentence, it would be: “Lead us the hell out of the mess that you have created for us with all of your stand-alone solutions.”  

I am an old guy. I would be fine with going back to the way that things used to be. Slower. More personal. More interactions with people. Less technology. But I am also a realist. There is no going back. And, if you can’t beat them, join them. So, if law firms are going to do tech, wouldn’t it be nice if they did it well? 

So, let’s talk about stand-alone solutions. In law firms, you will find many specialized computer applications which are used by some lawyers in the firm, but not by others. For example, the litigators will have little use for the corporate database software when they can just interrupt the corporate clerk fifty times a day with their questions. (After all, the clerks in some other department never have anything better to do anyway). Only the real estate lawyers use the conveyancing software. (Actually, only their clerks use it most of the time.) The Wills and Estates lawyers may use one program to draft Wills and another to administer estates. The family lawyers use a product that nobody else uses, cares about, or is even remotely interested in trying to understand. 

Let’s say that I use the same law firm to buy a house, draft a Will to leave everything to my  wife who is the love of my life and without whom I cannot possibly live, incorporate a couple of companies, handle my bitter divorce from that witch I married, transfer the house to my now awful ex-wife in the divorce settlement, prepare a prenup in case my new trophy wife turns out to be as challenging as my ex-wife, and change my Will to leave what little I have left to my new wife. After I die from the stress of it all, the data about these various transactions will reside in these different software products.  

The lawyer drafting the Will has to track down the details of my real estate holdings, even though they are sitting in the database in the real estate department. Then they have to chase down the corporate clerk for information on the corporations I own. The divorce lawyer will start from scratch to figure out my assets, as will the lawyer who handles the new prenuptial agreement. And then the lawyer working on the new estate plan will have to be told all over again about the house and the corporate shares. 

And the firm that will handle my estate when I keel over?  Information about my family, the current Will, the house, the prenuptial agreement, and the shares will be completely new to them as well.  All of this will involve a lot of unnecessary time, aggravation, and cost. 

And that is just about the clients. We have not even gotten started on retaining clients and referral sources. 

Let’s skip right over to the introductory level comments about buying the right software from great vendors, training people, obtaining proper support, and all of that everyday stuff. We all know that already. 

So, legal tech providers. Here are two things that you can do for us for starters:  

1. Give me one interface. I want to log in and access everything. I want every lawyer in every department and all of their clerks and assistants to see something familiar when they start to work.  
2. Have a single database for every piece of information. When the Estates lawyer logs in I want them to see all of the details of the properties and corporations that I owned before I checked out, who was suing me, and whether there are any domestic contracts in place. 

I am sure that you guys can come up with more. You are the experts, after all.  But here are a few ideas to consider: 

1. What if the client worked with some other law firms with different specialties? Wouldn’t it be nice if by agreement with the client and those firms, the database could be shared?  
2. A tie-in to the accounting department would be nice as well. I want to log in to start my work and know immediately about what everyone else in the firm is working on for this client, and the status of all of the work in progress and accounts receivable, so that I know how to approach fees and billing                  . 
3. Contact management – I would love to know who spoke to the client last and about what.  

I am occasionally accused of being too subtle in my writing, so let me close by telling the LegalTech industry what I really think:  You technology folks are bringing our profession to its knees. Now we need you to sort out the mess and chart a way out for us. The clock is ticking. Get on with it!