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.

And it may not stop there,
as it makes perfect sense for the Solicitors Regulation Authority to include technical competency
as a core feature of future qualification and CPD
point-gathering exercises.

For law firms to not fall foul
of these new developments, a rethink on technical training requirements is likely to be required by many. And as this
is the first time that external events have influenced the training room, firms need to
take into account what these influences are in terms of the training they provide.

Historically, law firms have either set their own training standards, or used external schemes such as the Microsoft MOSS, which was specific to
their desktop applications.

Adapting strategy

Many firms have technical training departments, so can adapt their training strategy
to include elements from either the KIA audit standard or the LTC4 specification.

Those who outsource their training need to consider standards as a key element. The LTC4 has a licensed scheme that firms can obtain via legal education specialists Capensys. Recently I spoke to Sue Pasfield, a director, who has long been an advocate of higher technical standards in law firms. Her view is that “clients are requiring law firms to change how they view internal technology skills, and we are seeing increasing numbers of firms adopting technology skills standards”.

As with many changes in the legal profession, some firms will not be aware of these changes, and some will probably ignore them. This, of course, is good news for those that embrace these new challenges, giving them a small but highly exploitable advantage in these changing times. SJ

Damian Blackburn is director of legal IT consultancy firm SLFtech