While the COVID-19 pandemic brought technology to the forefront in the practice of law, few lawyers are properly trained on the programs their law firm runs on a daily basis.
“Technology has been widely available in the legal space for 10-20 years or more, but lawyers are just beginning to wake up to technology as they see it being adopted in other industries, and as they have been forced to pay attention to it,” says John Tsiforas, Hofstra Law’s Director of Law and Technology and Director of the Law, Logic & Technology Research Laboratory. “It’s harder for lawyers to ignore technology now, but many lawyers still only use technology begrudgingly.”
The Importance of Legal Tech Proficiency
“There are two ways to use technology,” says Tsiforas. “One is reactive. It’s the bare minimum that a lawyer learns only at the time they need to learn to do something specific. It’s an ad hoc approach that in which your work dictates what you know.
The second is a proactive, visionary approach where the lawyer considers their overall practice and what needs to be done on a daily basis, but also on a long-term basis. It considers the goals for the practice and where the lawyer or firm wants to go, and how technology can be used to improve workflow and processes, connect different parts of the practice, reduce the probability of mistakes, reduce the number of people who touch a document, save time, and increase effectiveness.”
Too many lawyers fall into the first category.
Allison Johs, President of Legal Ease Consulting, Inc., who provides practice management and productivity consulting for lawyers, agrees. “Lack of proficiency with technology not only leads to inefficiencies, but it can lead to ethical complaints and loss of clients as well,” she says. “You can find numerous examples in the news of law firms – even large, well-supported law firms – that failed to properly redact pleadings or inadvertently disclosed previously confidential information.”
“Clients expect their lawyers to be proficient in using technology,” says Johs. “Many clients are even beginning to benchmark and evaluate their counsel’s proficiency in the use of technology to deliver legal services.”
Cybersecurity is another potential area of concern. “Even if lawyers hire people they trust to keep their information secure, lawyers should know the best practices for email and where vulnerabilities are; how to password protect or encrypt; best practices for document sharing; proper places to share/store documents in the cloud and what questions to ask for cloud providers,” says Tsiforas. “And there’s potential reputational risk for the lawyer and the law firm, in addition to the professional responsibility risks. No one wants to be known as the lawyer whose data was breached.”
The increase in virtual and hybrid work environments has increased the need for lawyers to be trained on legal technology even more. “With more lawyers and support staff working remotely, it is often easier for the lawyer to complete a task themselves, rather than to wait to get that task completed by someone else in the office, especially if everyone is no longer working the same hours,” says Johs.
Who Needs Technology Training and Education
Learning to use legal technology effectively is an important skill regardless of the size of your firm. “At a large law firm, you have resources available to you; there are no limits to the document and litigation support you can receive. But you still need to know how these basic programs work,” says Tsiforas. “On the other end of the spectrum, a solo practitioner has to perform a lot of tasks that paralegals or litigation support people would do in a large law firm. You may need to create documents from scratch or develop templates. You may need to know how to redact and bates stamp a PDF.”
Legal technology training is important for lawyers at every age and stage of their practice as well. “Most lawyers, regardless of age, still use programs like Word, Outlook and Excel the same way they used the original analog versions – the typewriter, the paper calendar or logbook. They are not using the full functionality of these programs that makes them so much better. Most lawyers were never trained on how to use these programs properly or how to maximize their productivity by taking advantage of the available features.”
Even trial lawyers need technology training. A survey of jurors performed by Amy J. St. Eve, Circuit Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit revealed that jurors like technology, and specifically, they like seeing evidence displayed on the screen using PowerPoint, especially in closing arguments. These tools can help lawyers summarize the evidence and jurors understand the case.
Hofstra Law at the Forefront of Legal Technology Training and Education
“It’s a common misconception that young lawyers are inherently better at using legal technology,” Tsiforas says. “Having dealt with many students at law school, we see that young lawyers and law students aren’t afraid of technology, but they don’t necessarily know how to use technology in a legal context.”
Early into the pandemic, Hofstra Law identified the need to offer law students additional training in legal technology. The Law School partnered with leading legal consultants and content providers, DOAR and Hotshot, to create the Summer Skills Institute, a series of online training modules in legal technology, transactional law and litigation. The Institute was modeled on programs offered by leading law firms to train their summer and junior associates.
Hofstra Law was one of the first law schools in the country to develop a legal technology center when it launched the Law, Logic & Technology Research Laboratory in 2010. Today, Hofstra Law has expanded its offerings to include courses in cybersecurity, cryptocurrency and courtroom technology. For its efforts, Hofstra Law was recognized by the American Bar Association as a Top 10 School for Teaching the Technology of Practice.
Hofstra Law’s Legal Technology Certificate Program
Tsiforas says the purpose of legal technology education can be summarized by what he calls the three Es: Technology empowers attorneys to use technology more efficiently and effectively, and this is the approach he takes to teaching the courses in Hofstra’s Legal Technology Certificate program, being offered for the second time this Fall to lawyers, paralegals and legal support staff who want to learn these important technology skills.
“Learning to use technology probably won’t change the substance of your brief or the quality of your evidence, but by integrating it into your practice, it provides you with more time to work on substantive legal issues or do business development. It reduces the probability of error and eliminates redundancies,” says Tsiforas.
“In this program, we don’t just teach random technology or disjointed functions. We designed the program by looking at the tasks lawyers perform every day and where they can get some big wins with technology. We take a thoughtful, practical approach to teaching to help them save a lot of time, reduce risk of a breach and the probability of mistakes. We look at where technology is being underutilized and show lawyers how to connect pieces together by using multiple functions or programs or different tasks so they can leverage them in a way that increases the benefit exponentially. Like a GPS, we work backwards from where you want to go and show you how to get there.”
The six-week Legal Tech Skills Certificate will teach lawyers, paralegals, and legal support personnel the essential skills needed to use the programs law firms already use daily – Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, and Adobe Acrobat. Registrants can sign up for classes individually or for all six. Classes are held via Zoom. To learn more or to register, click here.
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