Originally published by Greg Lambert.
If I am in a room with an academic law librarian for more than five minutes, I almost always get some form of this question:
What are the tech skills I should be teaching law students to better prepare them for working in the ‘real world?’
My answer is a pretty standard one. “Make sure they know the basics… then we can teach them the unique skills needed for our particular firm.” The same question came up last Friday when I was on the Law Librarians Conversation podcast with Rich Leiter, Roger Skalbeck, Elizabeth Farrell, Ken Hirsh, Darin Fox, and Michael Robak. Knowing the cool stuff is secondary to knowing the basics.
What are the basics? My guess is that you already know (especially if you’ve read any of my co-geek, Casey Flaherty, posts.)
- MS Word – especially style sheets and any basic tasks that are automated rather than manual.
- MS Excel – with some basic understandings of formulas, especially simple math formulas, sorting and filtering.
- Adobe PDF – Focus on how to effectively use PDF and exporting from other programs like Word.
- MS PowerPoint – pretty much Google “Death by PowerPoint” and learn the what not to do lessons.
- MS Outlook – learn rules and foldering. Once you’re at your firm, learn how Outlook interacts with your document management system (DMS) and be an avid filer and rule follower for the DMS standards of your firm.
It is amazing how many Associates show up at their firms, having attended seven years of higher education, and do not have these basic skills mastered. According to Casey Flaherty and Darth Vaughn’s ABA Journal article, “Tech comes naturally to ‘digital native’ millennials? That’s a myth” only about a third law law students get these tasks right on the first try:
- Accept/Turn-off track changes.
- Cut & Paste.
- Replace text.
- Format font and paragraph.
- Fix footers.
- Insert hyperlink.
- Apply/Modify style.
- Insert/Update cross-references.
- Insert page break.
- Insert non-breaking space.
- Clean document properties.
- Create comparison document (i.e., a redline).
That’s not to say that Millennials don’t have tech skills, it just shows that there is a difference in being a consumer of technology and mastering technology needed for the practice of law.
I commonly say that learning these basic tasks isn’t sexy, but it is necessary to understand before you can really get to the “sexy” technology later. Darin Fox, Law Library Director from the University of Oklahoma, corrected me on the Podcast and said that when his law students see what happens when they apply style sheets to documents, they light up, and think it is very sexy. I have forgotten how exciting it was when I first learned how to create a non-breaking space, and what affect that had on my documents, or the time I read Typography for Lawyers and finally understood why the old standard of double-spacing after a period was no longer the way to draft a document. There is a certain sexiness in creating a document that looks good, and does some “magical” formatting, or a spreadsheet with a built-in formula that displays information compiled from multiple locations.
Even if you don’t find the basic skills as sexy as some of us do, it is still necessary. When I talk to law students, I usually tell them that if they want to get into the really advanced technology and be seen as a tech guru at their firm (small or large), then learn the basic stuff first, show everyone that you’ve got that down, and then you’ll be the first person on the list when it comes time to try out the newest innovations. There’s so much going on in the legal tech world right now, that I think it is rivaling the dot com era. Artificial Intelligence is such a buzz right now, that I think we may be on the cusp of an AI boom/bust in legal. High tech courtrooms are more and more common, and I even got a peak at the Virtual Reality station in Darin Fox’s library.
With so many new and exciting tools coming on the market, law firms need help understanding which tools actually work best with the way the law firm works and practices law. We need attorneys to step up and test these exciting tools, and if you want to be that cutting edge attorney, then position yourself early by mastering those basic skills.
Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.
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