Disagree. I am pretty close to the Biglaw tech scene. While you’re correct that most firms would say they use all of those things, the actual implementation and execution isn’t there. It’s not even a nuanced critique, I mean maybe 1% of amlaw 100 revenue is even touched by anything in your list. There is a lot of work to be done, and great opportunity in the legal industry.
Agreed. For all their tech initiative claims and hiring of in-house "legal ops" people and even developers, your typical attorney uses hardly any legal tech outside of e-discovery or billing.
I can only speak for teams of attorneys, and my experience is mostly working with litigators rather than transactional lawyers, but among other things:
1) It's shockingly rare to see use of project management tools, even simple stuff like Basecamp or Notion. When multiple people need to, say, review a draft of a filing in sequence, they're typically either keeping track of it in their heads or in a spreadsheet. "Excel is totally adequate for this" is wrong for a variety of important reasons.
2) Infrequent use of file indexing, even Windows' built in. I see firms using document management software running old versions of SQL with totally the wrong kinds of indexes and which usually take forever to find anything or crash in the process.
3) If they exist I haven't seen them in use, but a lot of teams would benefit from some middle ground between nothing and e-discovery software for searching across relatively large but not enormous collections of documents. A rudimentary on-prem or local CRUD app that could ingest a variety of shit, OCR it if necessary, dump it into Elastic, and let you FTS it would probably sell like hotcakes to small and mid-sized firms.
