Ride the Lightning

Kia Motors Audits Law Firm Associates' Tech Skills: All Fail

July 3, 2013

Languishing in my "Blog posts" folder has been a story which really caught my attention last month. Kia Motors has instituted an audit to test the competency of outside law firm associates with technology. Nine audits produced nine failures.

The audit involves four mock assignments that a law firm associate must complete using standard software (e.g., Word, Excel and Acrobat). Done efficiently, the first assignment should take less than 20 minutes. Done inefficiently (not using the software correctly), it would take more than five hours to complete.

Not a single tested associate came anywhere close to the 20-minute mark on the first assignment. They approached the assignment inefficiently, in ways that required five to 15 times longer than necessary. At $200 to $400 per associate hour, that's one heck of a price to pay for inefficiency.

The tested associates came from different firms. Some were auditioning for work and failed to get it. Others were long-time outside counsel and agreed to rate reductions after their associates failed the audit with a proviso that the rate would be restored if they subsequently passed an audit.

So what can't associates do? They can't use Excel's "sort" and "filter" features and need to go line by line to take a provided spreadsheet and generate discrete lists of exhibits associated with witnesses on specific topics. They cannot manipulate PDFs. We have even seen associates, confronted with a Word document and told to PDF it, send it to a printer and then scan the document manually – apparently completely unaware of the "Print to PDF" option.

I was unsurprised at the failures. All consultants sing the same "training, training, training – and oh, did I mention training?" as critical to law firm survival.

The audit should be a wake-up call for law firms since it is such a clear example of how inefficiencies are becoming known to corporate clients, who will then take appropriate "sweeping the stable" actions. While you can quibble with the audit's particular structure, as the author notes wryly, "My audit is a prototype and, like its creator, not without patent shortcomings."