Legal Studies Home PageThe author is Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Academic Computing for the Department of Legal Studies at Montclair State College, Upper Montclair, New Jersey. He practices law in New Jersey. His consulting firm, Millennium Juris, Inc., provides training, analysis, and evaluation of hardware and software for small to medium-sized law firms.
In keeping with this issue's theme, training and management of staff in the context of technological innovation is the topic. I do not intend to invoke an image of a "Six Million Dollar Paralegal" lightly nor do I envision rows of legal assistants sitting at consoles with wires running to connectors embedded in neural pathways. Although alloy of worker and machine is largely metaphorical, they are interdependent. Technical training of staff cannot occur in isolation from a master plan which begins with an analysis of the particular needs of a law firm, considering a firm's: areas of practice, staffing patterns, staff retention, technical expertise of staff, future technical needs of the firm across four dimensions of human resource acquisition and development. These five planning areas will be treated in this article as equally important codependent factors.
Regular readers are probably thinking, what is a lawyer-educator able to tell us about training or management. Let me reassure you that my first graduate degree was a masters degree in Industrial and Labor Relations and Human Resource Development from Rutgers University in 1978. Computers were not in abundance then but technology was increasingly finding its way into all industries. In the late '70's, most of us in the field would not have brought the word "personal" any closer to the word "computer" than we would bring a magnet near a computer disk today. Although times have changed and computers are a necessity rather than a novelty, the most important principles of training and management involved in the integration of technology are still general management and industrial principles. Whether factory work flow is the object of routinization or production of legal memoranda, the problem issues and points of intervention are similar. The focus of efficiency is the productivity of the individual as amplified by technology. Obviously, the integration of human work habits, motivation, and over all profit loom large as issues in a law office as they do on a warehouse floor.
Unfortunately, compared with other industries law offices have been unusually resistant to innovations in human resource management and in integration of technology. There are several principles which explain this phenomenon. First, law offices have a narrow span of control, that is, power and responsibility are extremely centralized in most law firms. Unlike industry, administrators in a traditional law office both manage and produce. The combination interferes with the ability to manage because decision making is firmly established at the top of the organizational pyramid in the hands of those who may not be technologically savvy.
Second, law offices are managed by people who by and large are very narrowly trained themselves. What most lawyers know about modern management techniques and technology can be characterized by a list of commands such as "do it", "get it done", and "get it out by Friday". Because they are unfamiliar with technology and management, law firm managers are often not sensitive to the problems which staff has in fulfilling production requirements. This is not to disparage the highly competent lawyer-managers who lurk in medium to large size firms or the firms which have adapted to change. The rise of the managing partner, the law office administrator, and the managing legal assistant is ample proof that the profession has realized its limitations and is re sponding.
Third, the practice of law is not an easily routinized process. That is, no one knows how litigious individuals in a legal market are likely to be. Lawyers cannot predict when business will come through the door. Financial planning is difficult as a result. Of course, once initiated legal action can be rationalized, but a law firm manager cannot know: the requirements of each case in areas of complex practice, how a case will progress, whether a case will be the object of summary judgment motions, whether collateral issues will determine the tactics of a case, or whether an adversary will follow a predetermined order of practice. As a result, investment decisions, especially those which involve amortization and depreciation over long periods of time during which the fortunes of a firm may change dramatically, are tentative at best. Consequently, caution has been the watchword of many a law firm manager and investment in hardware and software has taken a backseat to partnership distributions, bonuses usually for equity partners or rainmakers, and bolstering security portfolios.
Without further digression, let's begin to look at the five dimensions by dissecting the most crucial one as far as staff training is concerned into sub-categories. Human resource can be conceptualized as having five factors: level of specific technical competence, ability to be trained, adaptability, and staff redundancy, and retention. Each factor is an employee quality which can be measured, improved, or sought.
Specific technical competence means carefully screening prospective employees to guarantee at least computer literacy in the programs which a prospective employee will be using in a firm. Resumes cannot be trusted to give an accurate picture of an interviewees computer prowess. If an employee claims literacy in a particular program, a simple test should be administered as the last step in an interview process. Promising employees who are not familiar with your law firm's programs should be given a more simple test or be graded more generously.
Ability to be trained refers both an interviewee's performance on tests of prowess using programs with which he or she is not familiar and general knowledge of computers. A high score in using Wordperfect or Word by someone who is familiar with Multimate or Wordstar indicates general computer literacy and the ability to be cross trained to use other software programs to perform other tasks should the need arise. Willingness to be trained means that an in
Adaptability refers to someone who has aspirations to learn new applications and to learn new jobs. An interviewer can determine whether this factor is present by looking at the amount and depth of education in technology. Someone who has consistently acquired new skills will be willing to adapt to changing technology and will make retraining easy or unnecessary.
Staff redundancy means that a firm must have interchangeable personnel. Cross training of adaptable staff who are computer literate will help achieve redundancy. Redundancy is important especially in law firms because retention of employees is often low and the unpredictable demands of practice often require shifting personnel from one job to another temporarily. Shifting of jobs often requires that personnel temporarily use an application program with which they are unfamiliar. Anyone who has worked on production of an appellate brief under a short deadline knows the importance of being able to increase speed of production by splitting and reassigning portions of the job among many people and having the pieces of the product finished simultaneously. Staff redundancy aids fragmentation of large projects which must be completed on an emergent basis by storing human resource as multiple skills in any one individual. A firm which can assign any one of many employees to a task can respond quickly and efficiently to increase the speed of production or to relieve a bottleneck.
Retention is a chronic problem in most law firms. Staff "burns out", is stolen in raids by head hunters, and becomes disgruntled by the lack of opportunity to advance. A tragic result of a uni dimensional approach to human resource development is that a firm may become a training ground from which other firms benefit when employees leave for one reason or another. A retention program is necessary maintain a highly motivated, cross-trained, and creative work force.
A retention program must create a law firm culture which is self-regulating. Many factors are responsible for creating and maintaining a law firm culture. Paramount among these factors are a sense of belonging to a team, a belief that advancement and reward are predictable and predicated upon a specific level of performance, that there is fairness of remuneration, and a belief that discipline is applied justly. A complete discussion of organizational effectiveness through sub-cultural enhancement is beyond the scope of a short article.
Unfortunately, the very structure of a traditional law firm militates against retention. The highly structured hierarchy of law firms causes employees to believe that advancement is limited to salary and benefit increases alone. Law firms that are the victims of high attrition do not have a self- regulating consistency of personnel. The result is a feeling that political intrigue is beneficial to individual success and that rewards and punishment are arbitrary. Obviously, in such an environment, there is neither loyalty nor stability, a condition even the best technology cannot change.
Here are some retention suggestions. Once a paralegal always a paralegal is written in stone in the minds of most firm managers. The way to conquer this belief is two fold. A manager must provide a variety of titles and duties by creating work groups that are fluid and which attack specific tasks. Second, a manager must create idea groups which consider and recommend changes in the way work is performed. Employees whose work varies and who are involved in the rationalization of work feel as if they participate in an organization in a meaningful way. In other words, involved employees feel important and want to solve problems rather than create them. They identify with the firm and their feelings of self-worth become intertwined with their feelings about the firm.
A variety of different titles creates a sense that dedication and performance are appreciated and rewarded. Separating job titles into steps or levels is another method of distinguishing expertise and seniority. Employees who can rise to a job title such as litigation paralegal step one or senior litigation paralegal have acquired status. If the path to advancement has clearly stated criteria and is fairly administered, an additional benefit is created. Those who succeed accept the validity and the fairness of the organization's rules and have an incentive to uphold the rules and protect the integrity of the firm. Assuming adequate salary and benefits, the result of promotion levels is a loyal group of employees who will be easily retained.
The second dimension of a well balanced firm is computer hardware which meets the firm's needs. Inadequate technology will over burden staff and create resentment. Even the most mature human resource plan will fall victim to disenchantment created by tools which hinder performance rather than enhance it. Sudden expansion can leave key personnel without computers, interfere Choosing correct hardware is the result of assessing the needs of a firm now and in the future with transfer of data among employees, and create a work environment in which the best employees are continually burdened with the most work.
A well planned hardware platform distributes work evenly among those who are best equipped to perform it. Hardware needs should be analyzed along at least four sub dimensions: the need for communication among computers, the present and future demand on hardware, the need and wisdom of integrating current computers with new computers in a network, and the ability of a firm to absorb the cost of upgrading hardware over a period of expansion which is guaranteed not illusory.
Third, applications software is a cousin to hardware platforms. Applications as most readers know means software which performs specific tasks. Hardware without software is like a brain without education. No effective performance is produced. Software must be chosen even more carefully than hardware because software defines the way in which work will be done and the way in which employees will communicate. The most frequently cited principle guiding the choice of software is, "choose software first and buy hardware to match".
Choosing software is not merely a matter of finding a package that works for the firm. Care must be taken to assess whether a proposed software package is consistent with the stored human resource training in a firm's warehouse. At least four questions must be answered about any proposed applications package: Can existing staff use the program immediately; How much time will be required to train staff to use a new program; Is the program widely enough used to have developed a pool of users from which the firm can hire; Is the file format of the proposed program compatible with the firm's existing hardware and software? If the answer to all three questions is not favorable, perhaps choosing another program would be more advantageous.
Choosing software begins with operating systems, the main housekeeping programs which computers use as a basis upon which to run applications programs. As regular readers of my column know from an earlier article which I wrote on operating systems, the current dilemma between choosing DOS, Disk Operating Systems, and UNIX, a powerful but more esoteric operating system, can only be resolved by determining what applications programs are needed now and in the future by a firm. If desired applications are available or will be available written for UNIX in a firm which has five or more workstations, which plans to expand, which needs inter-office communica tions, and which needs sophisticated transfer of data, UNIX may be a compelling option.(1). However, in todays environment Windows NT has become a viable alternative to UNIX.
The last dimension which must be addressed is production sensitivity. Production sensitivity means volatility of the areas of law in which a firm practices. Obviously, the more unpredictable a firm's practice, the more sensitive to disruption it will be. Heavy litigation practices in which many law suits go into discovery or to trial at once is a prime example of volatility. The less predictable events are in a practice, the greater a firm's need for a well-trained, cross-trained, experienced staff who are loyal enough to a firm to be relied upon to perform above and beyond the call of their job descriptions. Job satisfaction and retention guarantee that personnel will be ready, willing and able to meet a challenge.
Obviously, hardware and applications must be up to the challenge as well. Demands on staff which are too great and too frequent will eventually cause employees to leave or cause them to respond too slowly to successive crises. The result will be high attrition and a firm which is progressively less able to respond to each new crisis.
This article began by considering training. Training must be a continuing process. A plan should be created to increase the competence of all staff on all programs which they could possible be called upon to use. The free time which occurs even in the most busy firms should be utilized for training. A library of training software should be acquired over time to help staff enhance their computer literacy. Software rather than human training is preferable because it is most efficient. With the great variety of excellent training software available for most of the standard applications programs, there is no excuse for not creating an in-house training program.
The competition between human resource and technology raises an important issue: when a firm becomes predominately computer run should the staff alter human work patterns or should computers be pressed into the service of human eccentricities? A difficult question which has a difficult answer because the answer is essentially mixed. On one hand, if staff must work to satisfy rigid applications program architecture, there is a danger that tasks will be performed to the specifications of a program written by non-legal professionals. On the other hand, the alternative danger is that computers will be used as if they were efficient memory typewriters. Obviously, the answer is a hybrid of the extremes. Both computers and humans must be trained to be integrated. Human work patterns must meld with technology and technology must complement human resource.
Teaching Computers to train your staff and your staff to train your computers may seem like an overly technocentric approach to a topic which seems to require greater concern for the human component than the technical. After all, humans use computers not the reverse. Silicon based consciousness has not evolved to the point that it is challenging carbon based life, has it? Probably not, but computers are becoming dominant in law offices.
Staff training is only one of many interdependent dimensions which must be managed in a law firm. A firm, which ignores the interdependence of dimensions, risks unbalancing its human resource or its technology. The result is abject and chronic inefficiency no matter how well staff are trained. Remember ten loyal cross-trained $30,000 paralegals are better than one six million dollar paralegal.
In next issue's column, I hope to look at some state of the hardware and software and some recommendations for the ideal computerized law office courtesy of my Advanced Computer Concepts class. Fax your responses or your questions to 201-471-1424.
(1) 1 See, "Journey Back to the Future: The Future May be UNIX but the Present Belongs to DOS", Legal Assistant Today Creative Computing, ,1990.