Tell Me Why…

♫ I am lonely but you can free me
All in the way that you smile
Tell me why, tell me why..♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by Neil Young.

This is a post of a different colour (or color). It is really a series of questions wrapped up in a post with the hope and expectation that it can generate a bit of discussion. Call it an experiment of sorts in social blogging, community and dialogue in using a specific example to explore the topic of the adoption of technology by lawyers.

This blog post originated with a long discussion with Cecily Drucker, the daughter of the management guru Peter Drucker. I happen to be fortunate to know Cecily and have in fact, worked with and for her in the past. She is a lawyer in San Francisco as well as a burgeoning software developer. She is the President and CEO of MonetaSuite ..a company that has developed time tracking software for professionals but really aimed at lawyers. Cecily and I kicked the questions noted below around and we developed the idea of posting the questions here for consideration among the Slaw community.

Here is the enigma. We are just starting to emerge through a very difficult economic time. One would think that this would mean that lawyers would be pressed to track as much billable time as possible as easily as possible – especially in the last while. MonetaMail, a time tracking application for Outlook, along with other such tools (such as practice management applications) – are easy to use and inexpensive..they would pay for themselves within days of purchase and use by capturing time that may be lost when reading and replying to email as well as ‘quickening’ the time spent on tasks.

Yet MonetaMail (and we suspect, similar time tracking tools) are not exactly flying off the e-shelf. This raises questions regarding the economics of practising law. For one, lawyers state that they are moving to alternative billing; having an accurate picture of the time that one puts into a file would be (in all rational worlds) one of the most important points to know from the position of whether you are actually making money or not by moving to alternative billing. But they don’t seem to be acquiring the tools that would give them that feedback on whether alternative billing is actually good for them!

Secondly, lawyers claim that they are working hard and long yet tools that would help them work smarter are not being adopted – even in a difficult economic environment. Is it that they are running so hard that they don’t take the short-time ‘hit’ to learn tools that would help them in the long-term? Or is it that the tools are not well understood and it is difficult to bring this knowledge to them (or perhaps they are skeptical regarding such benefits)?

Third, perhaps the legal market is not as competitive as one would otherwise think. If it was, then the search for a competitive edge should mean that lawyers would be looking for tools that help them with not just the legal side of their practice but also with the efficient and effective side of running their practice.

Fourth, perhaps the Google business model has forever changed the name of the game. Perhaps people have now come to expect that applications – especially those found on the Internet – are available without charge.

Fifth, perhaps there are other factors at work? Thoughts? Tell me why, tell me why!