The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/34686
Attorney RFID: Your Personal Billing Barcode The problem is that we haven’t embraced it nearly tightly enough. And, as is so often the case, a very large part of the reason is obvious — the technologists have again been ignored. Attorneys equal income. Sure, the firm might make a few bucks on photocopies (for those that still track them), but it’s the attorneys that rule the bottom line. To do that, each one of them must pull in at least $500,000 per year. It’s staggering to think about — a half million dollars. And that’s just to start; the amount increases as his/her career progresses! Lost Time Let me focus on one example of our lack of resolve: unrecorded billable hours. It’s darn hard to remember at 6:00 p.m. what you were doing from 11:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Then the guessing game begins: I know I wasn’t at lunch yet…I met Janet at 12:30 p.m. She wasn’t happy about me being late…but my Sent Items says I emailed the Jarndyce opinion at 11:40 a.m. What the heck was I doing? Oh well… Lost time: it comes straight off the top — the gross income line. Those unrecorded billables are gone forever. They’re the bane of the system (and the attorneys, accountants and management), and have been for eons. As a technologist, if someone requested a way to track billable hours effectively, could you come up with something? Of course you could! A lot can be done with existing technologies. When I say this, someone usually chimes in that lots of firms already do that. It’s true, sort of. Almost There Some firms are working on what I’m getting at, but it’s primitive, rudimentary. Their software collates things like mobile and office phone records with emails and the document management system. The software tries to associate the records with matter names and numbers, and displays a consolidation to the attorney at the end of the day. All of this is to give the attorney hints about what files he was working on so he can reconstruct the billable hours. Yes, it helps, but the software can only ever be ho-hum at it. I work at the City of Vancouver. I work for cops. Believe me, when they phone, no one — not me and not our phone call logs — knows it’s them. The Data-Capture Project What more can we do? Let me give an example. I propose that we track attorney movements during the day, as part of a comprehensive data-capture project. The project’s goal: no lost billable hours — zero tolerance. When you work, you bill. When you don’t, you don’t. Radio Frequency Identifier (RFID) tags are the little plastic bits stuck inside retail goods. They make the alarms go off when you’re out for a little weekend shoplifting. Law firms stick them on files to track their meanderings. Stick those tags on every attorney (I’d stop short of implants, but I’m pretty liberal), and record their movements. It will help them, and you should tell them that. You’ll be able to show them where they were and when: office, meeting room, photocopier, legal assistant, coffee room, washroom, lunch, etc. Tie it all together using a game-trails app that can give each attorney an office map with their wanderings laid out, whenever. And think of what more we can do: • GPS/cell phone tracking for attorneys who are out of the office • Facial recognition (which clients are at what meetings?) • Telephone voice recognition (who did you talk to at work today, about what?) • Iris-tracking (what they were looking at on-screen — show it to them with time-lapse and slow-motion buttons) David Hill practices labor, employment and human rights law in the City of Vancouver’s Law Department where he also participates in departmental and city-wide technology initiatives. David’s broad background as a lawyer, legal educator, technology consultant and legal technology director gives him unique insight into the world of legal technology. He has made numerous presentations about the use of technology in law for organizations such as the Canadian Bar Association, the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association, ILTA and more. He can be reached at david.hill@vancouver.ca. The KM potential on this data is endless. I’m sure you can think of more. There might be a smidgeon of push-back — privacy rights, constitutional guarantees, threats of suit, professionalism…these are attorneys after all. That’s the time to recite every firm’s most beloved mantra: “The practice of law is a business — we must act like one.” It would be a rare business in any other sector that would permit a two-, three- or five-hundred dollar per hour asset to routinely drop five to 10 percent of its income stream. Not when there’s an app for that. Firms dedicate enormous overhead to the inefficient, un-businesslike practice of billing hours. Many (including me) have tried to talk them out of it for years. They want nothing of it. It is our responsibility to make sure they get what they’re asking for. ILTA Peer to Peer the quarterly magazine of ILTA 91