Overstuffed inboxes (or Law and technology 2)

The second article that caught my eye in Wired this month was Clive Thompson’s The Great American Timesuck. The article was singing the praises of AI-equipped email monitors like Xobni and ClearContext (which somehow I don’t think my IT manager would like, although he will be spared my trying to download either as we run on a thin-client system).

What caught my eye were the following paragraphs,

Artificial intelligence in the service of life-hacking: It’s the future of email.

And God knows we need a better future for email, because the present is intolerable. This once-miraculous productivity tool has metastasized into one of the biggest timesucks in American life. Studies show that there are 77 billion corporate email messages sent every day, worldwide. By 2012, that number is expected to more than double. The Radicati Group calculates that we already spend nearly a fifth of our day dealing with these messages; imagine a few years down the road, when it takes up 40 percentof our time. “It’s madness,” says Merlin Mann, who runs 43Folders.com, a leading productivity blog. “We’re all desperately trying to figure out how to cut stuff so we can get through the day, and it just gets harder and harder.” (Mann advocates dealing with incoming messages immediately so your inbox is always empty. Me [Thompson], I’ve got 12,802 messages in there right now.)

Why has email spun so badly out of control? Because it’s asymmetric — incredibly easy to send but often devilishly burdensome to receive.

For lawyers, where email is the preferred mode of communication, the above is all too true, and we are all having to deal with the problem of overstuffed inboxes.

Law and technology 1

The first of two interesting facts in the July copy of Wired.

From John Bringardner, Winning the lawsuit, in which he notes that ‘in the US a pretrial discovery request today can generate nearly 10,000 times more paper than 10 years ago’,

So how has this evidentiary deluge changed the practice of law? Consider that five years ago, newly minted corporate litigators spent much of their time digging through warehouses full of paper documents. Today they’re back at their desks, sorting through PDFs, emails, and memos on their double monitors – aided by semantic search technologies that scan for key-words and phrases. In another five years, don’t be surprised to find juries chuckling over a plaintiff’s incriminating IMs, voice messages, video conferences, and Twitters.

I see it coming sooner.

BlackBerry as fig leaf?

A quote from a Links partner, reported in Linklaters says: take a BlackBerry break in Thelawyer.com,

I have to admit, though, I do feel a little naked without my BlackBerry. It’s like when you leave the house without your watch on.

Not sure how worried I should be. I don’t have a BlackBerry (as those of you who read this blog will know), but I am now going to have to own up to the fact that I don’t wear a watch either. I only feel naked when I leave the house without my trousers on.

Who is shaping our brave new world?

Picking up on my immediately preceding post, an excellent article, The road ahead, in The Law Gazette on the future of legal services.

In the present turn down it may sometimes seem difficult to look beyond the month end figures, but long term survival requires it, to say nothing of what the up and coming generation expects.

I cannot do better than paste in the final paragraphs,

For Susskind, the questions he always poses to the profession are: why is it that people pay lawyers good money? What value is it they’re bringing? The best answer he has seen comes from accountants KPMG, whose global mission statement is, he paraphrased, ‘we exist to turn our knowledge into value for the benefit of our clients’.

‘I think it’s a fantastic way of summarising what all of us as professional advisers seek to do,’ Susskind concluded. ‘We have knowledge, expertise, inside ideas that clients want to apply in their circumstances. It doesn’t say we exist to supply one-to-one consultative advisory service on an hourly billing basis…

‘The thing I want people to think about in the future is in the legal market we have to strive to find even more imaginative and creative and, I suspect, cost-effective ways of transferring our knowledge to our clients in a way they can apply in their circumstances.’

To do so, we also have to work out our strategies taking into account three or four key issues

1) The future will not be more of the same. Read Futurewise, Six Faces of Global Challenge by Patrick Dixon.

2) The market for legal services is not effective: if you haven’t yet read Stephen Mayson’s paper Legal Services Reforms: Catalyst, Cataclysm or Catastrophe, you should. The problem? ‘An oversupply of qualified people without a corresponding increase in “qualified lawyer” work’; the result? ‘Too many qualified lawyers, too many law firms, and too many equity partners: and a market ripe for reform. . . [leading to] consolidation, merger, and, occasionally, failure’.

3) Legislation is simply accelerating inevitable change: the Legal Services Act will open the profession to new entrants, but technology, the great driver of change, is already altering the way our clients seek and take legal services (and this takes me back to The mobile lawyer, posted yesterday).

4) The aspirations and expectations of the next generation, and the one following them, are not the same as those of us who currently determine the course of law firms.

Priority fruit

If you have read my blog before, you will not be surprised that I don’t agree with Penelope Trunk’s views on BlackBerries, found through another excellent post on Law 21, Core competence: 6 new skills now required of lawyers, but her post Stop blaming your Blackberry for your lack of self-discipline is still worth reading, if only because it promotes the myth of the multi-talented, multi-tasking Generation Y-er

If you want to see a whole generation make great choices about their priorities using the Blackberry, then latch onto Generation Y. They have been managing multiple steams of conversation simultaneously for more than a decade, so they are aces at it. And they are fiends for productivity tips. The most popular blogs are productivity blogs, and David Allen is a rock star in this demographic. So young people are constantly using prioritizing tools to make their information and ideas flow more smoothly for both work and life, back and forth, totally braided.

Blackberries are tools for the well-prioritized. If you feel like you’re being ruled by your Blackberry, you probably are. And the only way to free yourself from those shackles is to start prioritizing so that you know at any given moment what is the most important thing to do. Sometimes it will be the Blackberry, and sometimes it won’t. And the first step to doing this shift properly is recognizing that you can be on and off the Blackberry all day as a sign of empowerment.

Penelope is obviously one of those people who takes her BlackBerry to bed (you will have to read the full post to know why) but she is right about prioritising, and time management is one of those 6 new skills now required of lawyers (although I am not so certain that this is really a new skill: it is perhaps more that the pressure of modern practice means it is even more important).

As for the other 5 new skills required, I will come back to these soon.