Building upon the innovations of yesterday’s and today’s law firm
February 29, 2008
Practicing law
If a lawyer in 1977 billed 2,000 hours a year, colleagues considered him a “wild man,” said Mayer Brown partner Alvin Katz.
Lawyers used to typically bill between 1,500 and 1,600 hours, he said.
“Virtually all large firms now have a minimum of 2,000 hours a year for associates,” Katz said. “It is not uncommon for associates to
bill 2,300 and 2,400 hours. Clearly people are working more than they were 30 years ago when I started.”
Law firms used to employ more secretaries, he said. But the role of the secretary has generally changed from stenographer to personal assistant.
“Nobody writes out things by hand and very few people dictate anymore,” Katz said. “Most lawyers compose at keyboards. When I was a young lawyer pretty much every lawyer had a secretary.”
Mayer Brown is above the ratio of three lawyers to one assistant, and is heading toward a four-to-one ratio, he said.
Law firms used to be very task-specific, said Joseph Reagen, assistant general counsel/intellectual property for Baxter Healthcare Corp. Clients hired them to do a project, and the firms wouldn’t look beyond that project, Reagen said.
They now consider the full picture, and try to figure out how they can be integral to a company’s operations, he said. For example, one of the firms he works with, Bell, Boyd & Lloyd, helped Baxter fill a legal staffing gap by letting the company borrow a few of the firm’s lawyers and paralegals.
“They typically do it at a reduced cost, recognizing that it is a long-term investment, and having one of their employees here is integral,” Reagen said. “There’s been much more of a dramatic shift, particularly in the last few years, for law firms to be more full-service, and more attuned to a client’s business needs, rather than task-specific.”
The pace of things has definitely picked up, Katz said.
Drafting an agreement used to take time, with someone using the better part of the day to type it so it could then be mailed. Someone would read it a couple days later, and call with comments.
Word processing, Federal Express, fax, and e-mail help compress the amount of time lawyers now use on a matter, he said.
“It used to be that if you did three or four drafts of a document that was a lot, because a lot of time and effort went into producing a draft,” Katz said. “Now with word processing, you can do 15 or 20 drafts. Documents are longer because it’s easier to pull provisions out of other documents and incorporate them.”
Lawyers didn’t work from home because they couldn’t pop open a computer with all their business information, he said.
“With cell phones and BlackBerries, I am pretty much never out of touch,” Katz said. “I think, in some respects, that the technology has improved lawyers’ lives because you are not chained to your desk. You can be away if you are expecting a call and go about the business of your life.
“By the same token, clients can call you in the evenings and on weekends,” he said. “Most of us are pretty much working 24/7, not all those hours and all those days. But most of the lawyers I know work some part of every evening and every weekend.”
When Catherine Steege attended law school, Westlaw and LexisNexis were available, but people considered them an expensive proposition. Most law students and lawyers still did their research in the library.
When she started as a lawyer in 1982, she didn’t have a computer sitting on her desk. The single biggest change in the legal industry is technology, said Steege, now a Jenner & Block partner.
If a lawyer doesn’t handle a client’s matter within hours or sometimes minutes, the client may question the lawyer’s level of responsiveness, said Ropski, from Brinks.
“The pressures placed on us to multi-task are immense,” he said. “One of the hardest things you have to do is find time to turn off the BlackBerry, turn off the computer, and focus on one thing at a time.”
Today’s firms must be tuned in to their clients’ technology needs, said Joseph M. Gagliardo, managing partner and chair of
the litigation group of Laner Muchin. This can be anything from access to a file to billing technology.
The way lawyers practice law has changed because of the technological advancements, Gagliardo said. Clients expect a higher level of service, and they expect their lawyers to be available and responsive, he said.
“We commit to returning all calls within two hours,” he said. “And we also periodically do client surveys and share the results with clients, and again that is designed to make sure we are in tune with what our clients are looking for.”
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