KRAMER: Jerry, don’t you see? This world here, this is George’s sanctuary. If Susan comes into contact with this world, his worlds collide. You know what happens then?
– “Seinfeld”, Episode 118: The Pool Guy, November 18, 1995
Who among us has not been in a “worlds collide” situation? While not at the same level of absurdity as the fictitious George Costanza and his interesting relationships, there is a grain of truth to this when it comes to the use of technology as individuals working in the legal profession. Perhaps we’re starting to get comfortable using advanced chat assistants in our personal lives, while still navigating some outrageously outdated concepts in our professional lives (say, file formats for trial presentation).
But what are these worlds made of? Why are they different from each other? What is lost by them not colliding? Let’s take a look.
World One
World One is one’s life outside of work, and specifically the role that technology plays in that world today. 2025.
You routinely rely on your now AI-enabled smartphone to run most of your life, including texting your partner, family, and friends, liberally using the autocomplete feature in your messaging app without even thinking about it.
You plan your vacations using tools that have refined their algorithms so much, and developed review-driven feedback loops so sophisticated, that actually having a subpar experience in the physical world has seen a dramatic drop in probability — no mean feat.
You run your daily errands in a car that, if built within the past several years, likely has an armada of standard safety systems that silently work within milliseconds to reduce the odds of a severe accident. [We’re not even talking about “self-driving cars”].
At the end of a long day’s work, you unwind by watching content that has been exquisitely tailored to your needs by an algorithm that knows you better than the vast majority of people with whom you interact.
And finally, and most recently, as you find yourself stuck on something as mundane as remembering which episode of Seinfeld (or Severance) had a particular monologue, you ask your favorite awkwardly-named chatbot and get the answer in seconds. If you really take things up a notch, you could use that same chatbot to help you find your favorite recipes, help your child with their homework, and generally serve as the “starting point” for whatever it is you need to get some help on.
That’s the power of technology being embedded into our daily lives, making things just that much better. And then you have World Two.
World Two
This is a different place, frozen in time for many legal professionals.
A place where dinosaurs roam the earth (or at least their file format equivalents: MPEG-1, MDB, CMS).
A world where many systems have stayed essentially unchanged since the days of AOL CDs, Nirvana, and, yes, Seinfeld.
A world so ancient that even the software providers of some back-office services are not ready for the phase-out of Windows 10 this October, even though they had a literal decade to prepare.
A world where “video drivers”, “autorun.exe”, and sending USB drives in the mail are still things that legal professionals need to worry about.
A world where exquisitely trained carrier pigeons deliver deposition transcripts right to the high-floor corner office windows of senior partners of law firms. (We might be exaggerating a little on this one).
Many readers from outside of the legal space might find themselves incredulous at the above descriptions. But barring the last one, these are all firsthand conversations that our team has had with legal professionals. It is a different world indeed.
And it’s not a world that necessarily works well for people. Processes in World Two are slow, buggy, and often extremely unreliable. Since the legal profession demands extreme fidelity and reliability, workarounds and redundancies have been created to paper over the flaws in these workflows. There is operational overhead associated with these redundancies, which further reduces productivity.
It’s a vicious cycle. And in our view, an unnecessary and exceptionally wasteful one. If only World Two could meet World One.
Worlds Collide
What would a collision of such worlds look like?
At a fundamental level, it would at a minimum start by questioning why things are done a certain way.
– Why does deposition sync software have to be bound to a specific desktop?
– Why do attorneys or paralegals have to think about device drivers and file formats when their precious time and formidable skills are better used in case preparation?
– Why do deposition summaries have to be limited to a simple condensation of individual paragraphs into a single sentence?
When one generates more questions like this, and finds no real answers to the above other than “it’s always been done this way”, that’s when you know that the collision is happening. But unlike most collisions, which are destructive, this one has the potential to be immensely constructive.
From where we sit, this collision looks like it’s starting to happen. More quickly in some places; more slowly in others. We’ll revisit our observations from, and our beliefs in the implications of, such a collision at a future date. For now though, it looks like our friend George’s concerns — at least as they apply to legal technology — are unfounded. What do you think?