Around a quarter of lawyer moves from small-to-medium sized law firms in the Southeast of England over the past year have been driven in part by the need or desire for better technology and support, according to leading UK legal recruitment firm Blue Pelican. That support is particularly needed when it comes to facilitating successful hybrid working.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Julie Fernandes, who heads the legal division of Blue Pelican, said: “I’ve had an increasing number of lawyers come to me saying that the technology at their firm is a bit backwards or the case management is either non-existent or it just doesn’t work and that’s why they want to leave the job. It might be part and parcel with other problems that they’ve got within their role or the firm, but the lack of technology is a big reason for them looking to leave their job.”
She adds: “They might not be hitting their targets, for instance, but a big reason why they’re not hitting their targets is because they don’t have the technology and support to be able to do that. If you are spending so much time having to do administrative tasks when that’s not what you’re being paid to do, but the technology is not in place to help you, that’s a big issue.”
When it comes to working from home, Fernandes says: “Hybrid working just doesn’t work particularly well because again, many firms still haven’t got the technology in place that’s reliable and that lawyers can really rely on at home. So, they end up having to come into the office and again, it just makes for an unhappy lawyer.”
According to Fernandes, the number of lawyers blaming technology for their desire to move may be higher than 25%. They come from law firms specialising in different practice areas, although within residential conveyancing, where lawyers typically have a high number of cases, Fernandes says: “It’s really important to have good technology in place because it can be quite high volume. For one person to manage that volume you need a really robust system in place.”
In terms of why lawyers are concluding that their technology is unsatisfactory – for example whether they have recently worked at a different firm with better tech, or have spoken to peers, or read about technology in the news – Fernandes says: “It’s a mixture of everything. If they’ve got a system crashing or it’s just not usable and it’s not user-friendly and they’re not keeping on top of their workload or clients are complaining, that’s going to be key. Quite often it is that they’ve worked somewhere else that for whatever reason, they’ve left, but they compare the system against another system and it’s just nowhere near as good.
“Sometimes it is just from looking at things on LinkedIn or industry news, or quite often lawyers just talk, whether it’s in court or when you’re on the other side of a transaction. A lot of my candidates come to me through referrals, and will say something like, ‘I’ve got a friend who is a solicitor who does the same job as me but the system they are using is so much better than mine.”
In contrast, one of the firms that Fernandes works with is technology law firm Law 365 in Tunbridge Wells, and she says: “They have the best technology; it’s seamless. Someone said to me they could probably still work from the moon. And these days that really is a really important selling point.”