Advocating Technology.40 years ago, the Beatles gave their last public performance, the Boeing 747 made its maiden flight, Indira Gandhi was dealing with a split in the Congress and Richard Nixon was President of America. Vishwanathan Anand was born, so were Brian Lara, Sanath Jayasuriya, Steffi Graf and Catherine Zeta-Jones. So was the Internet..Early internet enthusiasts proclaimed the beginning of a “paperless office”. That hasn’t happened yet, but for lawyers, the net has largely been a boon. Most firms now employ significantly fewer support staff. Files are accessible instantly and globally, irrespective of location. Search times for documents have reduced, client response times are a fraction of what they were in the past. E-mail has replaced faxes and letters as the standard form of communication..Roles have changed. The traditional law firm librarian today typically knows his way around a range of online content. Billing is far more coordinated and uniform. Firms are increasingly spending more resources on organizing and archiving briefs and deal documents. More and more lawyers are beginning to specialize in such arcane areas as e-discovery, a topic to which entire conferences are sometimes devoted. The online data room has made it unnecessary for transactional lawyers to travel to Moscow or Mumbai or Minneapolis..Rabindra Jhunjhunwala, a Partner at Khaitan & Co.’s office at Mumbai feels that technology is now an indispensable part of a lawyer’s profession. “Gone are the days when one thought you could shut shop on a Friday evening and not be available till Monday morning. In today’s world, and the time differences, your Blackberry, data card, laptop, etc. is no luxury. It is a necessity”, he says..And yet, a law office that uses the internet extensively opens itself up to a plethora of problems. By one account, a law firm that uses as few as three computers in the office will lose as much as Rs. 2,88,000 ($ 6,000) a year, if those computers crash for 20 minutes every day. Expensive investments in office infrastructure need to be accompanied by the continuous upgrading of software – from sophisticated content packages such as Lexis or Westlaw to increasingly indispensable antivirus programs..As information technology improves so must training programs for lawyers and most international law firms today employ their own IT trainers. One US-based legal magazine reported that in 2007, average total IT spending per lawyer for certain firms grew to more than Rs. 19,68,000 ($ 41,000) per year. The average large law firm’s technology budget stood at a whopping Rs. 57.3 crores ($ 11.2 million) in 2007..In this downturn, those costs will increasingly be questioned by clients and law firms alike. So how does a firm decide which technologies to use? Dennis Kennedy, an attorney who speaks and writes frequently on Internet and legal technology topics, indentifies six considerations to be kept in mind when a firm decides to use technology..(i) Does it cut costs?.(ii) Does it make you indispensable to your clients, as e-alerts and e-newsletters do?.(iii) Does the technology help you get new clients – for instance, how many hits does your website get and from whom?.(iv) Does the technology help you move into new practice areas? (As knowledge management software does, for instance.).(v) Does the technology help you recruit and retain people?.(vi) Does the technology genuinely help to make your life easier?.While the western civilization has been traditionally, technologically ahead of the eastern domains, the Indian legal system, including the courts have adapted to the concept of technology very quickly. The National Informatics Centre commenced enabling the courts in 1990. With the Supreme Court and all High Courts having been computerized, NIC’s focus is now on the 400 odd District Courts..Internet enthusiasts constantly seek new frontiers. For example, one of the latest is the idea of cloud computing -a system in which users rent physical infrastructure to access software services online. Consumers access only the resources that they need and pay only for the resources consumed. For lawyers, however, these exciting technical developments are best approached with caution. Services which firms may find exciting may not be welcomed by clients. Services which promise efficiency may compromise security. Services which increase speed may decrease safety. The internet may evolve but lawyers should approach it using their traditional skills of caution, verification and an eye for detail.
