A Harvard Law School degree looks great on paper, but technology-savvy law firms can often trump competitors who come to beauty contests armed only with Ivy League pedigrees. That was the message of the 75-minute In-House Counsel Panel at the 2013 Legal Marketing Technology Conference/West, held in San Francisco Tuesday at the Hotel Nikko.  Want to impress corporate counsel? What really grabs their attention is when attorneys “get it” — and show the ability to to understand and fulfill the individual needs of clients.

This ability often translates into lawyers’ willingness to admit their weaknesses, and work to shore up their expertise on basic computer-related skills, says D. Casey Flaherty, corporate counsel for Kia Motors (and a frequent contributor to Law Technology News). It’s a mindset that needs a paradigm shift, he says. “Lawyers are often quick to dismiss what they are not good at as ‘unimportant’.” But this attitude comes back to bite them in some unsuspecting ways, he notes. Flaherty has developed a “tech audit” that he uses to assess a law firm’s overall technology literacy. Candidate firms are asked to bring a top associate, who is given mock assignments that test the computer skills of basic skills like publishing to PDF, sorting a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, and using Word styles. The devastating results (so far, no firm has passed the test) have revealed such a paucity of these skills that it has been the talk of the industry.

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