What IT Professionals Wish Law Firm Staff Understood About Their Jobs

Written by Jan Berinstein  | 27 September 2011

Bridging the Gap Between the IT Department and End Users

Last year, I started a discussion in the Legal IT Professionals group on LinkedIn, asking what IT people wish law firm staff understood better about their jobs. My interest in the topic was more than theoretical: For nearly 25 years, I’ve worked as a legal word processor, and I’ve been a software trainer specializing in the legal field for almost as long. In those capacities, I’ve witnessed first-hand numerous interactions between users and IT departments—good, bad, and ugly.

I’ve heard complaints from both sides, but mostly from the users’ perspective. One of my goals in starting the discussion on LinkedIn was to give IT people a chance to express their views—and their needs—as a step toward bridging the gap between two groups that face rather different demands and issues at work.

In this article, I’ve provided highlights of the discussion, with quotes from many of the IT people who responded.

Only two people gave me explicit permission to quote them by name, so I have supplied only general descriptions of the others whose comments I’ve used herein. I should point out that I’ve “cleaned up” some of the punctuation, but have not changed the substance of any respondents’ comments.

The original questions, and selected responses, follow.

• A question for IT people: What do you wish law firm staff (and members of similar organizations, such as government agencies and corporate legal departments) understood better about your job?
• Also, how can IT people and staff members work together more effectively? Are there certain common practices among staff that undermine -- or cause problems with respect to -- your objectives?
• There sometimes seems to be a real disconnect between IT departments and the employees they serve. In part, I think that is due to physical separation between the two (many staffers have never met or communicated with anyone in IT); it also probably results in part from different lingo, approaches, and cultures.
• What can be done to bridge those differences?

The IT people who commented made a number of different (and thoughtful) points. Interestingly, however, certain themes recurred in their responses. Those included the following:

Unrealistic Expectations and Eleventh-Hour Requests
Several respondents noted that users frequently have unrealistic expectations about what IT people are able to do and how quickly they’re able to do it. When there’s a problem, they want an immediate solution. And when they need assistance setting up equipment for a meeting or a presentation, they often wait until the last possible minute to ask.

London-based IT trainer Michelle Kaye said users often underestimate the amount of effort that goes into resolving their issues: “Depending on the system that the company is using, your 'simple' request actually takes a lot of time in the background to work out.”

Kaye emphasized the importance of users giving the IT folks plenty of notice when they need help with equipment: “Calling IT 5 mins before you want a new computer to take with you [and] set up for a meeting is unlikely to happen. You knew about this days ago—why didn't you tell IT then so that they have time to deliver.” In general, “A heads up for deadlines would be useful, as IT could then make sure not to schedule any downtime over that period.”

An analyst at a U.S. government agency in Tennessee explained that he can’t help the legal staff if “…they don’t ask for my help in a timely manner. If there is going to be a trial with a million pages of documents, it would be nice to hear about it sooner than the day before they pick a jury.”

Ben Schorr, a self-described “technologist” in Arizona who has written books about using Word and Outlook in the legal profession, agreed. “We're an afterthought,” he said. “We DO get those calls 5 minutes before they have a big meeting and they need us to configure [their laptop] for the projector.”

As for last-minute requests that turn fairly routine tasks into urgent, time-critical problems, Schorr quipped, “My job is putting out fires, but I work with arsonists.”

Not Your Personal Support Slave
One person, an analyst at a law firm in Ohio, faulted users for taking their low-level issues directly to the IT department, rather than calling the Help Desk. In her words: “The helpdesk/service desk is there for a reason. They should always be the first point of contact. . . . .Your helpdesk/service desk should not be bypassed just because you know a second-level or third-level support person. Helpdesk analysts know the answers to the most commonly asked questions, route calls, and most importantly track the problems a firm's users are experiencing. Bypassing these people helps no one. Second-level and Third-level support personnel have other duties than troubleshooting. Their job is not to be your personal support slave.”

Going Rogue
A number of people spoke of their frustration with staff members who expect the IT department to drop everything in order to customize their computer or set up their favorite devices (whether or not sanctioned by the firm). In Schorr’s experience, it happens frequently: “…often we get attorneys who buy some new thing and then show up with it and expect us to just integrate it into our systems. IT is rarely consulted ahead of time about whether that Fruitberry or iGadget will actually work with our systems and then we're expected to support it on the spot.”

Other people echoed those sentiments. They confirmed that many lawyers take for granted that the IT people will be able to implement their own “special” hardware and/or software, seldom giving much consideration to compatibility issues.

As the Ohio analyst put it, “I work hard to make the lives of the legal personnel at my firm easier. I spend a lot of time making sure that everything we load on your systems integrates properly and doesn't conflict with any of the other software loaded. Please consider this BEFORE you load other software. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.”

Similarly, an executive at a consulting company in Texas mused, “The law firm staff have a responsibility to consume the service that IT provides in a manner consistent with the firm’s goals and vision. If the goals and vision are to provide low cost, high efficiency, low complexity, and minimal resources, then the expectations of the staff should not be instant response to a new package of software that an associate downloaded on a laptop that is not within the standards and policies set forth by IT.”

No Magic Button
One respondent, a former lawyer who now works in knowledge management in the U.K., had an interesting take on the reasons staffers have high expectations: “…lawyers have very little appreciation of just how complicated law firm IT actually is, usually because the IT department is working so hard to make it look easy.”

Furthermore, he said, nowadays an entire generation believes there should be instant solutions for every problem. “The Google generation in particular imagine that IT can do anything you want it to; can we not have a ‘button’ that will do that? Magic! But like most magic, it takes absolutely ages to work out how to perform it.”

The Tennessee-based analyst pointed out that doing a good job actually is a mixed blessing because it can reinforce users’ unrealistic expectations: “I don't know everything about everything. I think I am very good at what I do, but there are things that I don't know and will take time to research.”

Stuff Happens
An IT manager at a law firm in Italy said staff members tend to assume that the IT department is responsible for just about everything in the firm. Also, he philosophized, no matter how skillful the IT people are, things just go wrong from time to time.

“Sometimes everything that is powered, supplied with electricity, is considered to be part of the IT domain, so IT people are involved in lot of things that take away chunks of their scarcest resource: time. Moreover, even if IT permeates every aspect of our life, it's not [something that people can take for] granted; hardware can stop functioning, software can have bugs, and it takes a lot of work to make everything go smooth every day.”

Similarly, an IS director located in the U.K. stated, “There is no such thing as perfect software for any given value of perfect.”

One of Me, 90 of Them
Several respondents pointed out that users tend to forget that there are other people in the firm who might also need assistance. The British IS director noted that “IT is not a free and unlimited resource.” He said users need to keep in mind that “Yours is not the only issue that is being worked on right now.”

Or, as the government agency analyst in Tennessee remarked, “in our office, there is only one of me and there are 90 of them. That's not very good odds. I am here to help, but if I don't know your deadline you are likely to be put at the end of the queue. Sorry about that.”

We’re Not Mind-Readers
Many people expressed frustration with users’ inability to describe technical problems in sufficient or meaningful detail. In the words of an IT person in the Pacific Northwest, “…it's an art, not a science and …I can't diagnose something when you ask me why your computer ‘doesn't work’; we really do need more details.”

Schorr said virtually the same thing: “We're not mind-readers. :-) ‘My computer is dead’ isn't a particularly useful explanation of the problem.”

He went on, “At a minimum clearly state what you were trying to do and clearly state what happened when you tried to do that (including any error messages). You don't need to know what an IP address is, but if you get an error message on the screen that says, ‘There is an IP address conflict with another system on the network,’ please tell me that since it gets me a lot closer to the actual problem (and solution) quicker.”

The IT people who participated in the discussion agreed that users don’t need to become techies, but they should be able to describe the basic problem or, better yet, create a screenshot that they can forward to IT.

Kaye urged users to learn enough “so that they can request what they need, or explain problems. E.g., ‘My computer is completely dead’ was actually ‘I can't log into the network’—two different problems and solutions.”

However, an Ohio lawyer pointed out that communication is a two-way street: “Each [side] needs to be very careful to explain whatever to the other in language both can understand—i.e., keep everything simple and be willing to make needed jumps to fill in communication gaps.”

Eek! A Mouse!
Multiple respondents said users need to meet the IT people halfway (and avoid making things worse). In a typical comment, the analyst from Ohio remarked, “IT personnel do not spend the day memorizing all the possible error messages you may receive! Please stop clicking and write down or screenshot the error BEFORE contacting us!”

We Don’t Get No Respect
More than one participant opined that IT people don’t always get the respect they deserve from law firm staff.

An attorney in Scotland, referring to his colleagues, said: “They believe they are more important than you, despite the fact that in reality they can't function without you. This is a lawyers' office, not an IT office. If they have a problem, you are bound to fix it, NOW, and in their minds they don't have time to explain the details. Their minds are on higher things. They are also more important than whoever else may be in IT trouble at that moment.”

The attitude, agreed an IT manager at a firm in Texas, seems to be that “…if you aren't an attorney or a paralegal, then you really ‘can’t be a professional.’ Perhaps a mutual understanding of both careers is needed.”

This point of view sometimes creates an atmosphere that isn’t entirely conducive to teamwork, as a Washington, D.C. consultant noted: “By the time we meet [the lawyers at a firm] we're introduced for the first time almost exclusively, by a ‘problem.’ In the best of introductions, we can become associated with and sometimes as, the problem. . . . IT people are educated of course, in a different field than the law. We're willing to learn and are proud to own a problem with our clients. However, if left to fix [it] alone, we can only provide half of any solution.”

Making the same point, Schorr commented, “I think lawyers are more-often trained to identify problems and affix liability...not necessarily seek out solutions. Far too often we've been called to the office of a firm having serious tech problems and their priority has been to gather us all in a conference room and blamestorm the problem, rather than trying to actually fix it.”

If It Ain’t Broke…
One significant area of disagreement between law-firm staff and IT people had to do with the amount of time (and money) firms should spend training end users. A few lawyers argued that IT people put too much emphasis on staff training, ostensibly to the detriment of the lawyers’ bottom line.

For example, a London-based solicitor wrote: “I understand that I need some training but here is the catch. If I spend half a day on a training course that is something in excess of £1,000 or $1,500 in billable time lost. The question is this: does that training give me the chance of making back that lost income and some extra profit or not?

“Someone said in the thread that IT is not an end in itself. A good IT department should go one stage further. The prime, sole and singular function of an IT department is to make lawyers more profitable. If a system does not achieve that then it is a failure and so is the IT department which has introduced it.

“Simply pleading for more training for lawyers is not the answer. A lawyer’s job is to do law and the job of the IT department is to allow them to do so with the absolute minimum of training.”

By contrast, the general sentiment among the IT people who responded was that (1) a limited amount of training can produce a large return on investment (ROI); and (2) other investments in technology, such as upgrading equipment more frequently, can benefit companies financially and in other important respects.

For example, the Italian IT manager argued that staff training not only boosts productivity, but also makes people less dependent on the IT department: “…staff must be trained regularly, on new and old programs. So people won't get frustrated because they use a program they understand poorly, [they] will be more productive, calls to IT for support will decrease, and IT will have more time for other activities.”

The Scottish lawyer, taking a position opposite that of his counterpart in London, said, “I make it part of my job to learn enough about my required IT systems to make them work to my advantage. Time spent becomes time saved, which gives me more time to spend. I try not to look at it as time ‘lost’; it's just not. We can see big chunks of time, such as the three training hours, as ‘lost’ because we can stress about the volume of the time and multiply it by hourly rates. But what about all the invisible minutes here and there frittered away on poor IT use?”

Added Schorr, “The ROI on training, at least up to a point, can be quite high.. . . . Not to mention the reduction in dependence upon help desk staff for relatively simple tasks.”

A member of an IT firm in Detroit observed, “IT costs money, and, as they say, ‘you gotta spend money to make money.’ Keeping servers and computers updated keeps the firm more productive, which means more billable hours. Trying to run a practice on a 10-year-old server or with 7-year-old laptops is probably costing more money in billable time than upgrading the system.”

Returning to the thrust of the original discussion—how to bridge the gap between IT people and law-firm staff—the Scottish lawyer suggested that “…the bridge between differences can only be built by positive attitudes on both sides to meet in the middle, a positive attitude to development, implementation and use of systems, not by the attitude that the ‘sole’ function of the IT department is to ‘make’ lawyers profitable.”

Out of the Ivory Tower
Notably, the respondents didn’t put the entire onus for improved communications on the legal staff. Many commentators acknowledged a need for IT people to make a greater effort to speak the same language as the users, to understand users’ needs better.

Along those lines, the IT manager in Italy added, “IT people have to leave their ivory tower. . . and IT has to learn to talk the language of the customers. . . otherwise it will be impossible to deliver the solution to the problem, if the nature of the problem is not understood.”

An Australian lawyer who previously worked in IT said everyone has to make more of an effort to work together. That is, “…the answer lies in both groups modifying their work practices to mesh effectively as an inter-disciplinary team.” She urged users: “Stop to explain to your IT people what you do and how you do it. It's harder than you think for them to understand…”

Finally, a director of sales at an IT company in the Dallas / Ft. Worth area suggested the importance of teamwork: “If everyone works together (IT, staff, management) toward clear objectives, IT can bring tremendous value to a firm. In fact, technology can/should be a competitive advantage for a firm that employs it properly.”

Conclusion
One of my goals in starting the discussion was to open the channels of communication between IT people and law firm staff. After all, communication, along with a willingness to put oneself in the other person’s shoes, can make for a more pleasant and productive workplace.

If staff members have a clearer understanding of the nature of IT—and the difficulties IT people face trying to keep everything running (and keep everyone happy)—they might make more of an effort to meet the IT department halfway. According to the IT professionals who participated in this discussion, the staff could help most by (1) giving the IT folks greater lead time (and specifying their deadlines, if any); (2) describing problems in more meaningful terms, or at least forwarding screenshots of pertinent error messages; (3) understanding that it often takes time to solve technical problems; (4) recognizing that there might be other people ahead of them in the queue; (5) contacting the help desk, rather than the IT department, for assistance with basic troubleshooting; (6) thinking twice before installing unauthorized software or hardware (or, at least, checking with IT first); (7) treating the IT people with more respect; and (8) in general, being more tolerant of the delays and uncertainties that are inherent in technical work.

With luck, this article and the discussion on which it is based will help to start an ongoing conversation that ultimately leads to greater mutual understanding.