CBA Record July-August 2024

spent the entire year of 2020 proving that remote work was possible, and no one has forgotten it. Very few people want to work completely remotely, but people want a greater degree of auton omy over their work. It’s true for law yers and it’s true for support staff. The hybrid model is a good compromise and is likely here to stay. 4 . The cloud is here to stay. When I began working at the CBA, a large part of the practice manager’s work was making a case for why lawyers should consider using the cloud within their practice. Many firms had adopted the cloud, but there were plenty of holdouts until 2020 left them with little choice. It’s hard to imagine most lawyers work ing without the cloud at this point. 5 . So is the subscription model for the tech platforms you use, unfortunately . A common gripe I hear is that lawyers don’t like paying monthly for services that used to cost them a one-time fee. (Microsoft, this means you.) I under stand this complaint, but it’s unfor tunately probably just something to which we’ll have to adjust. This model really does offer benefits, from immedi ate access to security patches and new features, to increased accessibility across your devices. Your best bet is likely to find platforms that offer as many fea tures as possible, such as a practice man agement platform that also tracks time and offers document automation. It’s been a busy seven years, full of major changes. Thank you all for reading and following along during my time as the CBA’s practice management advisor. It’s been my pleasure.

LPMT BITS & BYTES BY ANNE HAAG Takeaways from a Law Practice Management Advisor I began working at the CBA in the fall of 2017 as a Law Practice Manage ment and Technology trainer/coordi

of the profession center largely around whether AI might replace lawyers altogether. However, if anything has become clear since then, it’s that AI still very much requires a thinking, sentient human to oversee its work. I strongly suspect that the nature of much legal work, even with AI, will always require this oversight. Lawyers and the critical thinking they bring to the table aren’t going anywhere. 2. Cybersecurity threats are only getting worse . My time at the CBA coincided with exponential increases in both the number of law firms targeted by ran somware and the dollar amount of ran soms demanded by attackers. Beyond the law firm, scams are virtually every where. The days of the easy-to-spot Nigerian prince scam emails are long gone—modern phishing emails are often quite sophisticated (at times even incorporating tactics that use deepfake audio) and hard to detect, even for the well-trained. Getting scammed at times feels like an inevitability. It’s in your best interest to stay on top of cyberse curity trends and to remain trained to know what to look out for, but perhaps the best thing that you can do is to par tition access to your data to minimize what can get stolen. Zero trust archi tecture is the way of the future. 3 . Workers want flexibility . Workers

nator. I worked under the supervision of Catherine Sanders Reach, whom many of you may remember as a stupendous figure in the law practice management world. I took over as the CBA’s Practice Manage ment Advisor in the fall of 2018. Since then, the world has changed, and the way lawyers work has followed suit. We weath ered a global pandemic, an AI revolution, and countless significant world events and upheaval. This column will be my last for the CBA as I pivot both personally and pro fessionally and begin a new career as a therapist in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. The CBA has been a wonderful home these past seven years, and while I’m excited for a new chapter, I’m sad to leave. In honor of this transition, I thought it would be appropriate to reflect on some of the key things I’ve learned about law practice over the years. 1. Lawyers aren’t going to be made obsolete . Seven years ago, fears for the future of the legal profession largely centered around resistance to inno vation and the uptick in alternative legal service providers. Then came the launch of ChatGPT in late fall of 2022, which marked a sea change in how the average person interacts with and uti lizes AI daily. Now, fears for the future

Anne Haag is the CBA’s Practice Management Advisor, a certified crisis counselor, and volunteers as a patient advocate in the ER.

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