From Strategic Legal Technology:
Lawyers like precision. As a result, they often let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The new economic reality may force them to live with approximation and ‘good enough.’
First, a story. After graduating NYU Law I worked for Bain & Company as a strategy consultant. Consultants, like lawyers, consume much information. Unlike lawyers, however, they accept ballpark estimates. So I was in for a surprise when I subsequently switched to practice support for a law firm.
I needed to know the average rate for documents reviewed per review. The firm had no data so I asked several lawyers. All said “I don’t know” and said they could not estimate the rate. OK, I thought, time for new tactics. I asked some other lawyers, this time saying “I’ll assume the review rate is 100 docs/hour” to which they replied “no, that’s way to high”. OK, I said, then I’ll assume it’s 5. No, that’s way to low. Back and forth we went – all the conversations converged to a rate between 10 and 15 docs/hour. (This was 1989, paper docs, with issue coding.)
This was a valuable early lesson for me, one not taught in law school: for lawyers, silence is better than a chance of being wrong. Silence is better than approximation. The thinking and fear that underlies this mindset – I’ll call it ‘perfection thinking’ – has consequences.
Strategic Legal Technology – Can Lawyers Live in an Approximate and ‘Good Enough’ Universe?
