Lawyers' technical competency levels could demand any number of formal assessments

A couple of months
ago I wrote about the KIA Motors general counsel, and his drive to measure the IT competency in law firms. This comes as part of an overall drive to ensure that as a large purchaser of legal services, his firm was doing its utmost to secure value from service providers.

There has long been a view that law firms were not educating their fee earners appropriately in technology matters, but this has brought the matter out into the open, and along with other events, is changing the technology education landscape for law firms, or at least introducing one.

Lack of skillsets

A recent American Bar Association Journal article provided plenty
of criticism about the lack of technical skillsets among legal professionals. They particularly emphasise the growth of using e-discovery, and the notion that lawyers’ technical skills are not necessarily keeping up with
the changes, which loosely translates as not really doing their job properly.

E-discovery is probably not
yet fully mature, so one would expect a lag in terms of education. However, the vast majority of the technology in
use in law firms is mature, so
it’s not unrealistic to expect commensurately high levels
of technical ability.

KIA Motors certainly think this is the case, and it has emerged that the Chief Legal Officers Convention (CLOC) in the US
has started to push for better technical standards from legal suppliers. Given that it has 60
of the top Fortune 500 firms as members, one would assume that they have a sizeable legal spend, and thus a fair amount of influence on the legal market.

This influence is likely to manifest itself in the form of an inclusion in request for proposals (RFP) for minimum levels of technical competency for prospective legal suppliers. And if this happens in the US, it is likely to spill over to the UK fairly quickly, and almost certainly go beyond RFPs.

What this means is that law firms will be subjected to either
a KIA-style technical audit, or be forced to demonstrate certified competency levels for those
staff participating in panel
or RFP-derived work. The certification is likely to appear in the form of the Legal Technology Core Competencies Certification Coalition (LTC4) scheme, which assesses legal staff across a number of technical areas.
These include the traditional Microsoft desktop applications, along with more legal specific applications such as document management, time recording and using case and practice management systems.