Technological illiteracy and generational bias in the legal industry is causing law firms to implement faulty strategies regarding technical training and education of their attorneys and staff. Co-authors Ivy B. Grey and Darth Vaughn discuss the myth of the digital native and tech bias and applicable ethical rules.

No part of legal work is unaffected by the duty of competency. And now that’s true for the duty of technology competence, too. It requires lawyers to be competent in every tech tool that we use to serve our clients, not just fancy data security tools, but regular tools like MS Word.

This is not yet another article about e-discovery. We will not discuss confidentiality issues. Technology competence is broad, it is more than data security, it is more than e-discovery—it is about everything that lawyers do and every tool that we use to serve our clients.

This article is Part II of a two-part series discussing ethics and technology. Part I explored the ethical duty of technology competence. At the end of that article, I introduced the idea that inefficient use of technology in doing billable work for clients could mean overbilling that client.

The difference between good and bad legal writing is that good legal writing clearly conveys its message. If written work is sloppy, disorganized, or muddled then it fails because readers have limited working memory to consume and digest complex information. The more stumbling blocks in your writing, the less likely readers are to fully understand what you are trying to communicate.

Let’s face it: life inside of law firms is contentious. Despite a recent focus on civility in the profession, many lawyers seem to delight in finding and highlighting mistakes in legal writing. Even the kindest lawyers chuckle a bit when a judge quotes an attorney’s writing and faithfully includes the error followed by the dreaded “[sic]” in the court’s opinion.

A major corporate transaction involves a multitude of details, each with the potential for error. “Detail” is an all-encompassing and daunting term that covers everything from the transaction itself, such as structure, financing, and indemnities, to documenting the transaction, which covers spelling and punctuation, formatting, and consistent use of defined terms.

A lawyer’s time and advice are her stock in trade, so billable hours are front of mind. But a focus on hours billed ignores the more useful metric: realization rates. Your realization rate is the percentage of the time you work that is billed to the client and that the client pays. And it’s a key factor in determining and improving your bottom line.

The ideal of a paperless office has been talked about for decades. In the last century it turned out to be nothing but a fantasy. However, a generational shift combined with improvements in technology has changed that.

Writing is a reflection of an attorney’s abilities. And loss of trust in an attorney’s written work is the beginning of the end for any attorney’s career. Surprisingly, it’s the cosmetic and seemingly non-substantive errors that cause the reader to determine that a junior attorney is sloppy, uncaring and untrustworthy.

We used PerfectIt, Intelligent Editing's add-in for MS Word that finds inconsistencies, to check 3000 randomly selected documents. PerfectIt provides a powerful way to check for inconsistent capitalization because it: Finds entire phrases in capitals, not just individual words; ignores headings and other locations where capital letters are needed; only alerts users to phrases that are both capitalized and lowercase in the same document.