Current Technology Has Far Advanced the Legal Community

Posted on March 25th, 2015 by Legal Fee Advisors

Technology within the legal community is at a highpoint as communicating has become far easier than ever in the history of legal practice.[1] Today, we have eDiscovery, smart phones with constant updates, and research at our fingertips, as well as pleadings that can be sent in a nanosecond.[2]

Has this made members of the legal community more flexible? More and more availability to “connect” exists but has this really made law practices more efficient? And what does this say for billing protocols? Has this expansive “flexibility” made billing practices more accurate and transparent when an attorney can essentially bill anytime and anyplace and not be at their desk or office where, one can argue, visibility may render quantifiable accountability. Such billing possibilities or patterns would generally not be caught by ebilling systems because no matter how useful an ebilling system claims to be, it cannot replicate a human’s common sense when it comes to billing issues or discrepancies. It can be argued that technology is allowing attorneys to bill more than ever, but does that mean it is reasonable, for example, to bill more than 10 hours per day as a matter of course? Are clients truly getting the best representation and work product just because attorneys theoretically have more time to devote because of the current state of technology?

Despite the technological advances that have benefited the legal community (as well as many others), it can be argued that this has done more harm than good in some instances thereby rendering bill auditors, rather than computer systems, as considerably more important in today’s climate because of the billing abuses that can obviously surface as a result of these “advancements” and “flexibilities.”

Dawn E. Guglielmo, Esq.

[1] Eric Sinrod of Duane Morris LLP, It’s 2015: the future is here for legal tech, Lexology, http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0a5919a7-40e8-49de-a68c-c10d0d3f0026&utm_source=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed&utm_medium=HTML+email+-+Body+-+Federal+section&utm_campaign=ACC+Newsstand+subscriber+daily+feed&utm_content=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed+2015-01-08&utm_term (January 6, 2015).

[2] Id.