The Oklahoma Bar Journal December 2023

L aw P ractice T ips

Your Law Firm Upgrade

By Jim Calloway

B USINESSES TODAY FIND themselves in what seems to be a never-ending process of improving, upgrading and exper imenting with changing their business operations. Many of these changes are spurred by technologi cal advances. The internet changed the way many businesses operate. Historically speaking, not that long ago, businesses had no computers and employed many typists work ing on manual typewriters. Law firms, like all other busi nesses, have had to change. We’ve moved from debating whether it is professional for a lawyer to have a computer on their desk to almost every lawyer having a computer on their desk that they use daily. And who knew how habit-forming mobile phones would quickly become? The challenge with law firm upgrades is, as I have noted before, that it often seems like trying to overhaul an airplane engine with out landing the plane. Law firms have deadlines to meet and proj ects to complete. It is very chal lenging to pause operations even for a day, much less several days. If a law firm would list all the changes the lawyers and staff want to make, combined with the changes they need to make, it would likely involve a time com mitment of weeks of projects. Lawyers were early adopters of office technology. Fax machines were a miracle that saved the

kid ourselves. Change is usually difficult, and change management is challenging as well. For some additional reading on this topic, see “10 Beliefs That Get in the Way of Organizational Change ” from the Harvard Business Review . 1 One of the most interesting misconceptions is that change must take place slowly. Sometimes, it has a better chance of success if it happens more quickly. And, of course, deferring nonur gent needs often results in the problems becoming an emergency, often at what seems to be the most difficult time. Desmond Tutu is credited with saying, “There is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.” Massive projects will seem less

firms much in delivery and cou rier expenses. Word processors and computers allowed editing of documents without having to pay someone to retype the entire doc ument on a manual typewriter. It was a great disappointment to many lawyers to learn that computers needed to be replaced much more frequently than manual typewriters. Sometimes, IT upgrades are caused by problems. Law firms cannot have the network “going down” regularly, and no one has the patience to watch the hourglass spin, waiting too long for some thing to load. But that can result in not addressing the changes, aka upgrades, that are import ant but not urgent. And let’s not

46 | DECEMBER 2023

THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL