Whenever someone on HN talks about bringing tech to law firms I inevitably hear they are opposed to improving their process. It would lead to less billable hours for the firm.
Is this true? Not specifically talking about the top firms but firms in general.
Within this framework, lawyers have an incentive to be efficient. If you cut your hours so you write off 10% instead of 20%, you’ve freed up hours you could spend on new billable work. If you enter into a flat fee arrangement (which in various permutations are very common), the only way you come out ahead if by harnessing efficiencies. I think most law firm managers are numerate enough to realize these things by now.
The challenges to adoption are risk. Law firms can’t push back the release date because the software isn’t ready. That makes them very conservative about changing their processes. Cost-benefit is also an issue. Even the largest law firms are relatively small companies. All major business decisions are made by lawyers, and not even the managing partner works more than part time on administration. They don’t have the bandwidth to implement software X that majorly improves some specific process Y. For the effort to be worth it technology has to deliver cross-cutting improvements.
Smaller law firms will handle some things on flat fee now, bankruptcy, DUI, and other transactional issues. It is going to continue to increase when appropriate.