Thought Sponsor

The Efficient Employment Firm

Why modern employment practices are embracing efficiency (and how they’re using technology to do it)

By Jake Heller, Casetext

Jake Heller is the founder and CEO of Casetext. Previously, he was a litigator at Ropes & Gray. He graduated from Stanford Law School, where he was president of the Stanford Law Review, and he clerked for Judge Michael Boudin on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Heller is a Silicon Valley native and has been programming since childhood. In early 2020, Casetext released Compose, a product designed to increase efficiency in legal research and writing for motions. Many of Compose’s early law firm customers requested Compose motions for labor and employment law due to their interest in increasing efficiency in their employment matters, which is what led to the Wage & Hour collection as our first practice-area-specific Compose collection.

We wanted to better understand why efficiency is so critical to law firms today, and employment practices specifically. Most of them pointed to pressure from clients, so our next step was to reach out to clients to learn more about their perspective.

Why Efficiency Could Make or Break Your Practice

We talked to in-house counsel from 16 companies across a range of industries, including insurance, telecommunications, hospitality, pharmaceuticals, to clarify their expectations for efficiency from their outside counsel.

With the economic impact of the pandemic as the backdrop for these conversations, we asked each of these in-house counsel to answer whether efficiency was more important, as important, or less important compared to a year ago. Fifty percent of them responded that efficiency is more important than a year ago.

The other 50 percent responded that it is as important as the previous year. (No one responded that it is less important.) However, they also made it clear that the reason it is not more important now is that it has always been important, and that the firms that are able to increase efficiency are the ones that will earn their business going forward. As one in-house attorney put it, “We don’t have a choice—firm needs to change or we will change firms.”1

So, what does this mean for employment lawyers? We hosted a webinar with Steven Hart, a shareholder at Ogletree Deakins, and Melissa Sladden of Chevron to discuss efficiency from both the law firm and inhouse perspective.2

As Hart explained, employment firms need to increase efficiency if they want to keep up and continue to win business. “Our clients have always needed and wanted efficiency. But at the same time, they have to have first-class client service. So the challenge for us as outside counsel is to provide the best representation we can, while at the same time being cognizant of the pressures that our clients are facing,” he said. “It’s more important than ever before because, frankly, if we can’t provide that service as outside counsel in our particular firm, the clients will find someone who can.”

How to Build an Efficient Employment Practice

With the importance of efficiency in mind, we’ve compiled the top tips as well as mistakes to avoid that Hart and Sladden shared for employment litigators who want to make their commitment to efficiency a competitive advantage.

Top three tips:

1. Don’t be afraid of technology. Sladden’s #1 tip for her outside counsel is, “Know what tools exist, know how to use them, and know when they’re appropriate for your case—whether it’s A.I., a research tool like Casetext, or Microsoft Teams.”

Investing in technology is one of the easiest ways to help yourself do more with less. Ideally, spend some time investigating what’s out there and see if there are tools that could benefit your practice; at a minimum, keep an open mind when it comes to new technologies. 2. Share knowledge with your colleagues. Sharing information with colleagues can be an easy way to save time by helping you avoid reinventing the wheel. This could be anything from a research question to information about a particular client.

If you’re at a large firm, familiarize yourself with your firm’s DMS, and always be sure to look there for information about a specific client. As Hart points out, if you can find something your partner wrote for that client, you should use that as a starting point. You’ll save time you would otherwise spend on revisions and make the partner and the client happy.

If you’re at a small firm, take advantage of listservs and groups through your bar association or social media such as Facebook. If there’s a question you’re struggling to answer, it’s likely someone else has already been there and may be able to quickly help you find an answer. 3. Make sure you’re aware of the resources available to you. You may already have access to many of the tools, technology, and information that can help you be more efficient, either through your firm or through your bar association. Take the time to familiarize yourself with those resources so that you know what’s available to you. Make sure that you know how to get the best use out of the tools you do have access to, whether that’s by attending a training or by checking out their documentation.

Three mistakes to avoid:

1. Using billing codes clients don’t want to see. If there are any billing codes that you know your clients will push back on, avoid putting them on their bills. You can use these codes as signals for areas where efficiency could be increased; for instance, if you know that your clients don’t want to see time spent on legal research appear on their bills, determine whether there are tools that might help you approach legal research tasks more efficiently.

In addition to knowing what types of work your clients don’t want to see on their bills—like research time and internal meetings—Sladden recommends avoiding nonspecific billing codes that can make it more difficult for the client to find ways to be helpful and introduce efficiencies. 2. Not knowing enough about your client. Although you might be looking for opportunities to save time, don’t eliminate time spent getting to know your client. Do some online research, check out their website, or even schedule a day to go visit them in person (when it’s safe to do so, of course). This is especially important in employment cases, Sladden points out. If you’re representing a company, you may learn a lot about their office culture and processes by seeing them firsthand. 3. Sacrificing quality for efficiency. As Hart says, “At the end of the day, quality is job one. We have to be efficient, but first-class client service is table stakes.” Being more efficient doesn’t mean cutting corners; it means looking for ways to focus on the most important tasks and to do your best work in less time.

In practice, that also means taking the time to check your work. For instance, instead of starting a brief from scratch, you may be able to use a template to save time. That could be a great way to increase efficiency and reduce research time, as long as you check the citations in the template to make sure they’re still valid.

Conclusion

From our conversations with attorneys at law firms and in-house counsel, it’s clear that efficiency is—or should be—a top priority for firms that want to continue to win business. This is perhaps especially true for employment firms, where clients expect their outside counsel to demonstrate their ability to provide top-quality services in a cost-efficient way.

While looking for ways to increase efficiency for your firm, don’t make the mistake of cutting corners or spending less time on tasks where focusing your time could make a real impact.

Look to your colleagues to help you avoid reinventing the wheel, and look to technology (such as Compose by Casetext) to help you lighten the load and do more with less. Make sure you know what’s available to you, whether by purchasing technology tools—through your firm, through your bar association, or available for free online— and then be sure you’re using those tools to their full potential. 

Endnotes

1You can find a complete write up of our survey at https://compose. law/efficiency-report-2020/. 2Webinar available on demand at https://compose.law/the-efficientemployment-lawyer/.

Diversity & Inclusion continued from page 11

become infected” and all manner of other peoples in California— Italians, Greeks, Jews, Palestinians, and Armenians, for example— could be segregated, giving rise to “Hitler’s anti-semitism … in the country which gave its youth to aid in its destruction.” Mendez, 161 F.2d at 783 (Denman, J., concurring). 23Sylvia Mendez did ultimately attend Westminster and later became a nurse. She was awarded the 2010 Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. 24Not only did witnesses make clear that they did not believe Mexicans were “white,” but even Marcus, in his post-trial briefing, maintained that he had proven at trial race discrimination. See Brief for Petitioners at 5, Westminster School Dist. v. Mendez, 161 F.2d 774 (9th Cir. 1947) (No. 4292-M), https://www.docsteach.org/ documents/document/petitioners-opening-brief. 25See Sandra Robbie, Sandra Robbie’s “Mendez v. Westminster: For All the Children,” YouTube (July 9, 2020), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=F46Mlzt2tFc.

Editorial Policy

The Federal Lawyer is the magazine of the Federal Bar Association. It serves the needs of the association and its members, as well as those of the legal profession as a whole and the public.

The Federal Lawyer is edited by members of its Editorial Board, who are all members of the Federal Bar Association. Editorial and publication decisions are based on the board’s judgment.

The views expressed in The Federal Lawyer are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the association or of the Editorial Board. Articles and letters to the editor in response are welcome.