Category: Management and Technology

I recently had a personal experience that perhaps illustrates the power and limits of technology. I was grocery shopping when I noticed an employee using a hand-held wand to scan the shelf bar code for out-of-stock items. It surprised me that a person had to...

More and more, technology allows workers at all skill levels to work at home. Should law firms think about this option in their long term planning? This posting is prompted by an article the The New York Times ran, More Companies are Routing Calls via...

Law firm technology managers regularly face the question of when to upgrade software or hardware. The answer is neither easy nor obvious. Beware the Underlying Costs of Using Dated Technology from the New York Law Journal on law.com provides a good analysis of some of...

On Monday, I read two articles that made me think about whether law firms could apply market principles to improve their efficiency and effectiveness. Futures Trading and the Internet in the New York Times business section (8/11/03) discusses the power of the Internet to create...

How should lawyers and law firm/department managers charged with making decisions about legal technology go about gathering information? This post deals with collecting information about and analyzing legal technology options, not using legal technology intelligently. I am prompted to ponder this subject because in a...

Yesterday I wrote about the difference between making good decisions and achieving good outcomes. I am reminded of another example of this distinction by a Jim Rapoza eWeek column (July 14th issue), Choose Excellence. He discusses the interplay between innovation and vendor size, complaining that...

My approach to legal technology has always been informed, in this order, by what lawyers need to practice, by business considerations, and lastly by the technology itself. Recently, I was thinking of some maxims and catch phrases when I realized that many apply to strategic...

Legal Technology and Organizational Change (Interesting McKinsey Quarterly Article) Many law firms and law departments are interested in applying technology to improve law practice. Sometimes, new technology is merely a matter of a bit of back-end technical work and user training. Such changes do not...