Lawyers and technology: a bad marriage gets worse.

• Author: Flaherty, Casey
• Position: A - Special Issue: Technology & the Practice of Law

This genie will not be put back in the bottle. Technology's encroachment continues unabated. We have smart cars, smart TVs, and even smart toasters. "Smart," however, is often more about potential than function. Smart suggests a proliferation of buttons, menus, and options that only make sense after hours of trial and error aided by a dense instruction manual.

The Myth of the Digital Native

The kids will save us. They grew up immersed in technology. Wrong. The digital native is a myth. (1) Acquiring a Twitter account in utero does not bestow an innate ability to commune with the machines. While 83 percent of millennials sleep with their smartphone, 58 percent of them struggle to solve basic problems using technology. (2) Most of what passes for the technological sophistication of our youth comes in the form of passive consumption or, at best, rudimentary communication (e.g., texts, Facebook). They are not trained, and, therefore, do not know how to use the technology they encounter in a professional environment.

That young and old alike struggle with technology in the professional environment is unsurprising. The tools used are far from intuitive. Eventually, user interfaces and user experiences will improve. Someday, technology will work like magic. But today is not that day. In the meantime, our personal lives have gone digital (smartphones, connected cars, wearables). Our commercial lives have gone digital (shopping, taxes, banking). Our professional lives have gone digital (e-filings, e-signatures, e-discovery). And most of us, kids included, operate barely above the threshold of survival. Our technological competence is just enough to get by, for now.

In an information economy, attention is the scarcest commodity. We have finite attention to allocate to technologies that presume trained users. This challenge is not limited to individuals. Studies (3) find that for every dollar spent on new technology, enterprises must invest an additional $10 in organizational capital--training and process redesign--to capture the technology's full benefits. Related studies (4) find that it, therefore, typically requires five to seven years for an enterprise to properly integrate new technology. Without the complementary investment of time and resources, the technology only partially fulfills its promise, if at all.

The Digitization of the Legal Profession

E-filing, and the attendant need to be able to manipulate digital information to serve as an...