Here's an excerpt of a piece I wrote for the Connecticut Law Tribune about how clerical and administrative jobs in law firms are changing due to technology as well as being reduced in number:
Technology has allowed people to work together in different offices around the country on labor-intensive cases like class actions.
There's no typing pool anymore.
The clerical and administrative work on legal cases has changed to tasks like legal work by paralegals, basic document review, and creating the formatting on legal documents.
The result is that some law firms have reduced the number of people they employ in clerical roles or the administrative work has changed from taking dictation and filing hard copies in accordion folders to specialized roles like paralegals who can bill for the legal work they do, and jobs in quality control, client satisfaction and retention, practicing attorneys and legal consultants say.
Another trend, they also say, is that administrative professionals are becoming much more efficient in how they spend their time.
Part of Boston-based legal consultant Jeff Coburn's work is interviewing the legal clients of his law firms' clients to find out their satisfaction levels. One thing he has learned is that larger firms are under more pressure from their Fortune 1,000 clients to cut costs, said Coburn, managing director of Coburn Consulting.
"The last five years or so there's been a huge pressure on in-house legal counsel to get accountability for the legal department, which you never used to have 25 years ago," Coburn said. "It was like a black hole. They spent what they spent."
According to a survey conducted in March and April 2013 by legal consultancy Altman Weil, 89.7 percent of managing partners or chairs from U.S. law firms with 50 or more lawyers said that the legal market trend of having fewer support staff is permanent (238 firms answered the survey).
The vast majority of respondents also identified price competition, improved efficiencies in legal practice, more commoditized legal work and more contract lawyers as permanent trends.
The survey also reported that 38.6 percent thought they would have fewer support staff in five years, 41.6 percent thought they would have about the same, and 18.9 percent thought they would have more.
Eric A. Seeger, a principal with Altman Weil out of suburban Philadelphia, said the industry standard has changed to have one secretary for every three lawyers or even one secretary for every four or five lawyers.
Clerical jobs that were cut in the five years or so since the Great Recession also won't be restored, he said.
Twenty years ago, overtime for secretaries would be put on the bills for intensive matters like mergers and acquisitions or litigation, Seeger said. "You would be hard-pressed to get away with that today," he said. "I think that corporations that examine their legal fees and have billing guidelines pretty much uniformly say that we expect the law firm overhead to be included in the rates that are charged."
"Clients want templates," Coburn said for his part. "They want systems [that] ... get to the heart of it, which is a document, a jury trial, an opinion or the cost of a merger situation."
The biggest costs for law firms are the people they employ and the spaces they use for their offices, Seeger said. Reducing staff means not only that law firms save on labor costs but also potentially space costs if they can move into smaller spaces, he said.
"Some of it is driven by clients applying pressure and the fear that more clients will apply pressure," Seeger said.
The types of clerical services that are being automated include data processing, word graphics and document management, Coburn said.
Lawyer and Legal Journalist
