Casey Flaherty had a problem – he felt that his bills from outside counsel were bloated, and his hypothesis for the bloat was simple: “that lawyers in general are woefully deficient in using the software tools at their disposal – e.g., Word, Acrobat, Excel,” so it took them longer to perform basic legal work. To test this theory, he created a sample assignment to use as an audit of the basic computer literacy of associates from those outside firms. He administered the test to nine firms – and all failed. Although he concedes the results aren’t scientific, he concluded that there is a lot of waste in legal services, and enough of that waste is because of poor training in software that it’s a problem worth addressing. Now he’s collaborating with Suffolk University Law School’s Institute on Law Practice Technology and Innovation to make the audit available to law students, as well as other corporate counsel.
