Are law firms equipped to handle technology needed for business development?

You may already be following the advent of LXBN TV on LXBN (LexBlog Network). For those of you who haven’t seen LXBN TV, we’re doing interviews with leading lawyers on legal issues and current affairs in the news.

The interviews are conducted via Skype with a split screen displaying Colin O’Keefe, Editorial Manager at LexBlog, and the lawyer being interviewed.

LXBN TV is being well received by LXBN Network members. They love the positive exposure that being interviewed by an independent network gives them. The law firms find it much more beneficial from a business development and PR standpoint than if the firm was doing its own video work.

When I asked Colin how things were progressing he said great, except many law firms don’t allow Skype at their firms. I responded that the lawyers ought to then use an iPad on which it’s easy to download and run the Skype app. Colin responded that the Wifi access in many law firms is so slow, that won’t work.

One lawyer on Facebook told me that it looked like some of the lawyers were doing the interviews from home. They were because they had to.

Amazing. Simple solutions available at home and to your kids at school are not available in many law firms.

How can it happen? Leadership that’s uninformed as to where the world is headed and without the ability to get things done.

Everything else is just an excuse.

• Security? Work around it and come up with solutions like other companies do.
• Too busy? Time to prioritize.
• Our IT team is not equipped to get this done? Get them on the ball or replace them with an IT team that is.
• Skype is amateurish? You said the same thing of YouTube a couple years ago.

For entrepreneurs and small firm lawyers who get things done and can’t imagine such roadblocks, this happens routinely in large organizations. After my last company was bought by LexIsNexis, it took LexisNexis a year to get me VPN access so I could effectively operate remote when I was in Seattle – and I was an officer of the company.

My friend, Ernie Svenson, reminds me each time I see him that it’s as William Gibson says, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”