From this weeks Advanced Discovery Advanced Discovery blog:
I’ve been following the blog series on Insourcing vs. Outsourcing, by my Advanced Discovery colleague Matthew Verga, and found this week’s chapter especially interesting. The series is basically a more detailed deep dive into the topic that Matthew and I addressed in a webinar a while back (you can see a replay of the presentation here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2825368125753789186).
The most recent installment is called Organizational Self-Assessment: Technology Factors and can be found on the Advanced Discovery blog page athttp://www.advanceddiscovery.com/blog/2016/08/organizational-self-assessment-technology-factors/. The topic is Technology Factors which, as Matthew defines in this context, refers to an organization’s overall technology resources, sophistication, and comfort level. In reading that, I came to realize that when we did our webinar, we didn’t mention the wonderful tech audit tool for attorneys.
The tool was first developed by Casey Flaherty ( www.linkedin.com/in/dcaseyflaherty ) when he was Corporate Counsel at Kia Motors. The short version is that while at Kia, Casey decided to test the tech skill level of the company’s outside counsel. A full background of that story can be found in an ABA Journal article athttp://www.abajournal.com/legalrebels/article/could_you_pass_this_in-house_counsels_tech_test.
The more recent development is, that after leaving Kia, Casey started doing consulting work, and teamed up with Professor Andrew Perlman, Dean of Suffolk University Law School (http://www.suffolk.edu/law/faculty/26811.php), to create a new tech test he calls the tech audit. Suffolk has a legal technology think tank called the Institute on Law Practice Technology & Innovation (http://legaltech.suffolk.edu/), and together they have created a Legal Tech Assessment project (http://www.techassessment.legal/). This project uses the tech audit to not only show how much you know (or do not know), but also how much time you waste on basic tech tasks when you don’t know enough.
It’s a fascinating story with equally fascinating results. Take a look at some of the links to read about the results. You’ll be surprised.
Or not.
And don’t forget to follow the rest of Matthews’s series. Next week he’ll be writing about financial factors, the third of his four categories of key factors for organizational self-assessment. And later in the month, he’ll begin the fourth category, human resources factors before finally turning to key takeaways from the entire series. Don’t miss it.
