From Stone Age to Digital Life
I always wanted to be a lawyer. I don’t know why. I didn’t know anything about what lawyers do and don’t do. So, in 1986 I joined a commercial law firm in Australia. It was a big law firm at the time with maybe half a dozen partners and about 15 other lawyers as well as a few support staff. It’s now the Australian arm of Ashurst. (The internet tells me that Ashurst, with 31 offices in five countries, now has five offices in Australia and 152 partners.)
There was a mail room to handle the incoming and outgoing client letters, and snail mail letters. It had three telex machines – yup, ancient technology – to handle communications too. It also had a fax machine – novel technology then. It was locked behind a metal grille. It could be used only by authorised mail room staff. If a lawyer could persuade a partner that something was so urgent that he – and all of the partners were “he” then – would authorise the sending of a fax.
Legal practice was fast-paced by the standards of the time: if a letter was received from a client, we were expected to acknowledge its receipt within five days and respond to it properly (for example, with the requested advice) over the following two to three weeks. By snail mail.
But, as Bob Dylan sang: “the times, they are a chang-in”.
I recall the managing partner telling me in 1990 or 1991 or thereabouts of his surprise when interviewing potential practice trainees. Instead of asking about whether they would get an office with a window, for the first time he said they asked about what access they would have to technology.
Ah, for technology the firm was somewhat ahead of the competition: it had an IT department with two or three people to support the firm’s word processing capability – electric typewriters basically that had memory capacity of a few sentences or even a couple of short paragraphs. And the firm was so advanced that we didn’t dictate letters and documents to a secretary who would take down our words in shorthand any more: instead, we used a Dictaphone – yup, more ancient technology.
The IT department, implementing Mac technology, was quite influential. I made friends with the IT guys and persuaded them to include me in a “pilot” roll-out of the technology. So, I got a keyboard and monitor on my desk that connected to the inhouse IT system – no cloud services then. Typing documents, including going back and forth to make changes, was so much easier than using a Dictaphone, perhaps like using AI for an initial draft of a document is so much easier than labouring over research for an initial draft of a document now.
I well remember the senior partner in the banking group scolding me for typing instead of dictating. “We hired you to be a lawyer, not a secretary”, he said. After some debate, he reluctantly agreed that I could continue typing document amendments for two to three months if I could demonstrate to him – by looking at my client billings – by the end of that time that using a computer was an efficient way of doing client work.
The “large” law firm I joined in 1986 in Melbourne grew by merging with another firm in Sydney, establishing a small firm in Brisbane and establishing a firm with a “government affairs” speciality in Canberra. Some of the ways we worked are somewhat the same as in large law firms in Singapore now; some are very different.
Neither the firm nor its clients were using email much, if at all. So, how to get draft documents to them? Answer: print one copy, take it to the firm’s “print room” and ask the operator of the huge printer to print and bind X number of copies and courier them to nominated recipients. Suffice to say: the printer was the highest biller in the firm.
Oh, and the couriered copies went by light aircraft. I well remember the time a courier aircraft crashed in the Blue Mountains on its way to Sydney. Our documents were lost and a couple of transaction closings were delayed. We duly celebrated when the IT system subsequently connected the various offices so documents in the IT system in Melbourne could be printed in another firm office and only local couriers were required to get the copies to nominated recipients.
Long working hours for associates and senior associates were common. For partners, not so much. They still had their long lunches a couple of days a week, got away from the office in time to have dinner with their families, etc. most of the time. Partnership was something to aspire to as a reward after the associate and senior associate grind.
Meetings with clients were always face-to-face. Both the law firm and the clients expected that the client representative(s) would come to the firm’s office for meetings. Meetings were always quite formal affairs, though with a good deal of debate in negotiations. I vividly recall a meeting that I took an intern along to for the experience of being in a client meeting.
Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to me that I needed to tell the intern to keep his mouth shut during the meeting. At one point, there was a heated debate: the firm’s partner conducting the meeting insisted that the relevant law was X; the opposing client’s representative insisted it was Y. The debate went back and forth until the intern piped up with “He’s correct. It should be Y.” After taking a few seconds to realise that he had actually heard what he thought he heard, the firm’s partner gave me such a heated glare that I whispered to the intern that he and I were immediately leaving the room and, well, you can probably guess the rest.
Associates and senior associates stayed in the office to work until whatever time was necessary, including for phone calls with law firms and clients, etc. in other countries. I remember more than once being so tired that I was tempted to sleep in the office instead of going home. But how? One option was to stretch out on one of the comfortable couches in the reception area, but there was a risk of being found asleep (and possibly drooling) by colleagues arriving early in the morning. The other option was to sleep on the carpeted floor under my desk. Mmm. Driving home was a better option, even when I slept while driving and missed my freeway exit by several kilometres.
Fast forward. After 10 years as a banking and finance lawyer I left the firm and took a job inhouse in Australia. Then, in 2000, I moved to Singapore and became regional general counsel for a US MNC in the financial services sector, then moved to the US for a while to work on centralising the organisation’s regional operations into the US.
I was called to the Bar in Singapore in 2011 and established my existing “virtual” law firm/sole proprietorship in Singapore and now I find myself as a senior practitioner in Singapore. I say that my law firm is “virtual” because it is entirely based on technology. Let’s compare with the stone age and look too at how things have changed more generally:
- I don’t have physical premises that can be visited. Instead, I pay a fee to a service provider to provide me with an office phone number and an office address; they answer the phone in my firm’s name and take messages when I’m not available.
- I don’t have a mail room. I never receive snail mail; I’ve never had a telex machine; I last received a fax about 10 years ago. I’ve got a great scanner though.
- I receive emails to which I always respond within a half day, even if only to acknowledge receipt and to say when I expect to give a substantive response.
- I use cloud services for emails, document generation, document storage, etc.
- I have outsourced “IT help desk” support in case of need.
- I am very happy to be a sole practitioner after many years of mentoring/training junior staff, although I derive great joy in seeing my “fledglings” going on to be successful in their chosen areas of the law. Or other business, where they have decided that the law is not what they want to spend 100% of their business day doing.
- Before Covid, I met clients online sometimes, but otherwise in their office or in a convenient coffee shop or similar public place or, occasionally for clients visiting from overseas, I hired a meeting room. Since Covid, most clients simply seem to prefer to default to online meetings.
- Clients generally are very cost-sensitive now. It amazes me to look back and see that clients used to accept that they would pay by the page for printing, that they would pay for couriering, that they would pay for … well, the list feels endless really.
- The law is no longer a world of “he” – indeed, it seems that law firms now seldom talk about how many women are partners, senior associates, associates, special counsel or whatever; how many men or women are taking time off for a sabbatical or family responsibilities; how many are working part-time or flexi time to balance other responsibilities and aspirations. It is all just “how things are done around here” now and not something that needs to be remarked upon.
It surprises me how much I learned many years ago in “big law” that applies equally today right across the spectrum of law firm sizes.
Delegation is key. Many people shy away from it, fearing that what’s delegated to someone else won’t be as good as if they had done it themselves. Sometimes, they will be correct. When that happens, there’s an opportunity to pass some wisdom along to another person. Sometimes, they will be wrong. What’s delegated might be done differently and equally effectively; it might be done differently and more effectively.
We must always keep our minds open to doing things differently and learning from others, no matter where they may sit in the pecking order.
Find time to learn more than you need to do your job. I know that there’s no spare time to do it. But it’s important to make time somehow. I have come across lawyers with several years PQE, but they only know how to do a couple of things – which they know how to do really well. But they are trapped, sometimes in a career path that they love and sometimes where they find that career flexibility is limited.
Be kind to yourself and see if you can find a law firm to work for that gives great opportunities to learn more and widely, where new knowledge and new ideas are seen as a great thing. Life as a lawyer isn’t all about hitting your billing budget, though that undoubtedly counts.
Be kind to yourself and see what can be combined. A fast walk in the park to keep fit, enjoying a sea breeze perhaps and listening to an inspiring podcast. Sounds horrible, but it really is not. Or take the kids to their enrichment classes or sports or whatever and use the waiting time to simply close your eyes and meditate, to refresh your mind and energy levels. Maybe that sounds horrible too. The point is to figure out what works for you versus being stuck in a rut, stuck like a mouse on a running track and not able to get off.
Treat meeting notes, etc. as a strategic opportunity. We get bombarded now with AI services that will record meetings, come up with meeting summaries, devise “to do” lists, etc. Tempting to use them, correct? A good idea sometimes, but not always. Are they reliable? And accurate, taking context into account? Do they comply with legal and organisational standards? When it matters – that is, when it is important that they will serve their intended purpose effectively – be sure to be the one who is keeping a written record of what is important, how tasks are allocated, etc. rather than taking the easier AI way out.
The “companion piece” to this one? As we begin to see more documents drafted by AI and/or where comments and amendments are prompted by AI. Always be sure to be in control of document drafting and amendment. It is often tempting to have “the other side” – or their AI – doing all the hard work. But, being the person deciding whether or not to make/accept changes is generally better strategically than being the person who suggests them and is rebuffed. Is it worth the extra effort? Typically in my experience, yes, for optimal client outcomes.
My Final Words
In 1986 I didn’t know anything about what lawyers do and don’t do. Now I know that they can do whatever they want to do, whether in the law or not: the discipline of orderly thought required by the law serves us well when we figure out “what do I want to be when I grow up”.
