The LawBill Blog

In the 1980’s there was a series of Hanes underwear TV commercials featuring the fictional Inspector #12 who ended each commercial with the tag line: “It doesn’t say Hanes until I say it says Hanes.” The message was that there was a final arbiter of what was good underwear.  Imagine if there was a comparable measurement of what constitutes an efficient law firm business.

Today, instead of Inspector #12, we have Andrew Z. Adkins III, Director of the the Legal Technology Institute at the University of Florida, Spessard L. Holland Law Center.  In conjunction with Perfect Practice, LTI recently issued the “Case, Matter, & Practice Management System Study“. Download the Executive Summary here. The study co-sponsors were Client Profiles, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, InsideLegal.com, Legal Files Software, Omega Legal Systems, PerfectLaw Software and Synaptec Software.

The study sought to measure the attitudes of a meaningful percentage of the 1.2 million licensed US lawyers towards current law office technology, seeking to uncover the degree of acceptance, implementation or repudiation of specified applications and the reasons for each. While only able to sample from a population of 799,132 lawyers, 27,500 surveys were sent to randomly selected names. The goal was to reach a 95% statistical confidence factor with a +/- 5% error level. In order to reach this goal, the survey needed a total of 384 returned surveys. Only 341 surveys were returned, so the error level increased to -/+5.3%.

Consisting of 75 questions, the answers to the Study were then parsed according to the indicated size of each respondent’s law firm. The sponsors of the Study were seeking answers in these three broad areas:

• What is the market penetration of case, matter, and practice management software? In
other words, what percentage of the legal profession uses case, matter, and practice
management system software?

• What are the barriers to law firms and legal departments implementing these types of systems? In other words, why don’t more people use them?

• Are law firms and legal departments planning on purchasing these types of systems in the near future? In other words, has the legal profession reached a plateau in adopting Case Management System software?

Of the 75 answers, the one that was of particular interest to me was #47:

Q: If your firm/law department does not currently use a Case Management System, how likely is it that your firm/law department would consider a Case Management System in the next 12 months?

A: Very likely = 18.3%

Expressed another way, if this answer correctly describes the attitude of the general law firm business population, almost 72% of law firms without a Case Management System today are not planning to install one in the next year. If that is not a poor business decision, I don’t know what is.

To me, this answer and the others in the Study speak volumes about the need for additional education of the legal business community. While malpractice is a legal term, I prefer miss-practice to describe a 2010 law firm lacking the understanding of how much operating efficiency they miss without a Case Management System and synchronized time, billing and accounting system.

Mr. Adkins’ study has parted the curtain to allow those interested to see how much more work is needed to bring the legal business community into the 21st century. The complete Study can be ordered here. I advise anyone interested in this field to get a copy and read the complete, detailed results.

What do you think about this topic?