Well-known law department consultant Rees Morrison has an interesting post about lawyers in law departments.
He writes that in-house lawyers “barely scratch the surface of what accomplished users – not experts, just lawyers who have learned how to make the most out of a program such as Word, Excel, or Outlook – can perform. Powerful ways of working languish (think of macros, search and replace, and pivot tables)…”
This “chronic under-use” of the most pervasive business tool not only inhibits personal productivity, it also limits the ability of in-house lawyers as legal services consumers to judge the productivity of outside counsel. So the loss is a double whammy.
I only read Rees’ post after my prior Personal Productivity post about Google Maps. I concluded just about one year ago that personal productivity is still a worthy topic.