Net Generation and the Changing Law Office
By
Bill Brikiatis
Director, Corporate Marketing
eCopy Inc.
http://www.ecopy.com
Ari L. Kaplan, the principal of Ari Kaplan Advisors, wrote in The National Law Journal how “firms with summer associates have a tremendous opportunity over the next couple of months to leverage the power of the millennial generation.”
Kaplan outlined how this up and coming generation of attorneys – some of whom have already joined law firms – are bringing a built-in proficiency with technology and are skilled at using tech tools to collaborate.
This new Net Generation – the first group of “digital natives” – is shaking up the legal office workplace like no other age bracket.
To observers, it often appears as though this group was born with mobile phones and other handheld devices as appendages, and don’t understand how anyone can work without keyboard and mouse at the ready.
Many in this group see paper as archaic. This pervades their personal lives – try to find someone in their 20s who gets their daily news from a newspaper.
The opinion that paper is archaic also extends to their work lives where they are as comfortable reading a legal brief on a PC monitor as baby boomers are reading the same brief in hardcopy. Excess paper in the workplace also strikes against the environmental instincts of this age group.
Industry researcher IDC says the Net Generation “feels that their companies have not yet adopted electronic processes.” This is a risky position for law offices that want to attract the best and brightest.
Here are three steps law offices can take right now to help the Net Generation thrive in the workplace – and contribute to their potential.
- Start the transition away from paper. Document scanning software can help you connect paper-based information directly into the applications, such as case management, that handle your workflows. It delivers easily proven ROI – there’s no reason to wait.
- Look for software that enables staffers to work with PDF documents as they do with paper-based information. Electronically adding annotations, signatures, highlights, blackouts and whiteouts to scanned documents. Tapping optical character recognition (OCR) to create easily searchable text from scanned images is a way to save time when searching for the right document.
- Embrace the Net Generation as tech mentors in the office. This is a perfect opportunity where the students can become the teachers. Let them experiment in ways to drive paper out of workflows – and lead and teach the rest of the organization. Take advantage of the summer associate experience to boost the tech proficiency of your entire office.
Filed under: 2009 Conference
