Susskind supports Casey Flaherty approach

By | 5th February 2014

In various posts last year I highlighted the views of Casey Flaherty, General Counsel of Kia Motors America, Inc.

Casey espouses the view that lawyers who want to work for his company need to understand that the world has changed and that with it comes the responsibility to understand the contribution which technology can make to the discovery process in litigation and other contentious work.

To that end he has devised a technology test which lawyers who aspire to act for Kia have to undertake. There is, of course, more to it than that but the point is, broadly, that if you fail the test you do not get to work for Kia, at least on the particular job in question.

I mentioned this approach in last year’s posts entitled respectively Hang a Shingle, Time to Share and Gunpowder Treason and Plot if you wish to refresh your memory. Better still, you can see Casey being interviewed by Legal Technology News’ Monica Bay here.

Now the well known commentator on the legal profession, Professor Richard Susskind, has endorsed the Casey approach.

Writing on the Legal IT Professionals website Susskind says the Flaherty approach is “challenging…….imaginative and……highly pragmatic.” One of his theses is that lawyers must find a way of cutting costs and using technology to try and improve the way documents are handled, produced and reviewed.

In a specifc nod in the direction of Casey’s work, he says:

“But what this initiative does, is it makes the work of lawyers to some extend measurable. You know that old phrase that ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’? And what this initiative, it seems to me, brings is one way at least of measuring the productivity and efficiency of lawyers.”

In my view, if Richard Susskind approves the approach, it must be worth thinking about!