Lawyers’ Lack of Familiarity with Legal Tech Increases

Unfamiliarity with available legal tech among lawyers is growing despite lawyers being subject to an ethical duty of technology competence under Rule 1.1 of the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct. The results from Bloomberg Law surveys in the past three years show mounting challenges in keeping lawyers up to speed on the rapid changes and advances in technology. In the surveys — Legal Technology 2020, Legal Technology 2021, and Legal Ops & Tech 2022 — attorneys were asked what is holding back their organizations’ use of legal technology. In 2020, 40% of law firm respondents reported a lack of familiarity with available technologies. That percentage grew to 45% in 2021 and 55% in 2022. With the rapid growth of legal technology and advancements in how it provides efficiency, productivity, and profitability, there must be other reasons for this escalation. Survey respondents increasingly cited a lack of tech-savvy among users of legal tech, that the current technologies are too complicated, and that they lack access to effective training tools. Not only have courts ruled that counsel must be familiar with relevant e-discovery technology but the pervasiveness of technology and its use by clients means that lawyers must reverse this growing trend.