Don't modify the software, modify the way you practice law!

I've bent the ear of not a few acquaintances recently, singing the praises of "Softwar" a book by the former Economist technology writerm Michael Symonds, about Larry Ellison and Oracle. Not just a gossipy tale of Ellison's billionaire's life, the book is a serious treatment of Oracle's triumphs and goofs as one of the biggest software companies in the world.

Risking over-simplification, I cite one of Ellison's theses: When it comes to a business running Oracle's enterprise application software properly, the business ought to consider modifying its processes to fit the software, not modifying the software to fit the existing business processes. Much of the thesis' argument is based on the importance of avoiding the horrible complexity of taking an already complex piece of software such as enterprise ERP or CRM and tweaking the code to find that you've only broken the application. But a more significant take for me is that, assuming the software's any "good," perhaps the altered business processes that the unmodified software calls for are better than the business processes that had been operating before the software was installed.

Serendipitously, in the January 12, 2004 issue of "Fortune," there's an interview with Peter Drucker in which the interviewer asks the 94-year old guru, "What is the most important impact of information technology on business?" Drucker answers: "Information technology forces you to organize your processes more logically. The computer can handle only things to which the answer is yes or no. It cannot handle maybe. It's not the computerization that's important, then; it's the discipline you have to bring to your processes. You have to do your own thinking before you computerize it or else the computer simply goes on strike."

Now, Drucker goes on to point out several disadvantages of "this enforced discipline." It tends to force oversimplification; some business decisions can't always be systematized successfully. He then goes on to point out, too, that "older executives find it excruciating to have to be [as] explicit [in arriving at and implementing their decision processes], because they just don't want to be."

The "common law tradition" praises the accretive, incremental, at-the-margin, unsystemized results that - benefitting from the wisdom that comes of slow modification and experience - slowly build and alter the corpus that is the common law. Much of the way law firms conduct their practices seems to me to be a variant of the common law's approach to "conducting law." But just maybe law firms ought to think more consciously about how their practice processes work, and about how those processes can be explicitly, systematically rationalized.

I'm talking here not about law firm management, but about how deals are done, contracts get negotiated, and drafted, briefs get written and trial preparation gets done. Maybe, just maybe, the hoary old objection that practice software shouldn't be installed because it forces lawyers to modify the way they conduct their practices and that doing so is a bad thing is not 100% correct. When I hear that the software must fit existing practice processes to get the necessary "buy-in," to really be useful for the lawyers, I now think to myself - "not really."

Maybe lawyers should ask themselves if they shouldn't get around to examining just how they ought to modifiy their practice processes to fit good software. Buy'in's tough to get, but continuing to practice law with unexamined processes that impair efficiency, make the quality-of-life aspects of practice worse and, someday, put the firm at a competitive disadvantage when other firms "finally get it," is worth the effort - to get lawyers to buy into not just new software, but also new and better ways to practice law.

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I'm talking here not about law firm management, but about how deals are done, contracts get negotiated, and drafted, briefs get written and trial preparation gets done.