You can wait on most of the clever new software
There is usually one small job worth handing over now, and a longer list worth leaving alone for a year. Plus the question to ask before any client file leaves your building.
Somebody at a lunch this spring told you your firm was behind. There had been a demonstration, it was genuinely impressive, and you drove back to the office wondering what everyone else knows that you don’t.
In most of the firms we walk into, the honest answer about the clever new software — the sort that writes and summarizes — is “not yet,” and not “never.” There is usually one small job worth handing over now, three duller problems sitting in front of it, and one question the person selling it would rather you did not ask.
The one job usually worth handing over
Think about what somebody in your office does every Thursday morning. Your bookkeeper opens four places, pulls the same numbers out of each, and writes you the same email she has written for six years. Same shape, every week.
That job is worth trying. Whatever comes back is short, a person reads it before it goes anywhere, and a wrong number is obvious the moment her eye lands on it. She gets her Thursday morning back and still does the checking. The jobs worth starting with all look roughly like that one:
- Somebody does them on a schedule, not when a client calls.
- You could explain the whole job to a new hire in one sentence.
- Someone in the firm reads the result before anybody outside sees it.
- When it comes out wrong, the person reading will notice — and nothing has left the building yet.
Where it is not worth the trouble yet
The work you were hoping to hand over is usually the work that comes back worst. A job you do once a quarter takes longer to explain than to do. Anything resting on judgment — whether this client is telling you everything — stays yours, along with the rules your profession works under.
Watch for the mistakes that do not look like mistakes. A clean, confident paragraph with one wrong date in it will get past a tired reader at four o’clock, where a garbled one never would. If nobody has time to check the work properly, you have not saved an hour. You have moved it and lost the check.
And most of the firms we walk into have three duller problems ahead of this one. A former employee who can still read the mail. Copies of the files nobody has ever put back. The back room where the signal gives out. None of that gets better while you are evaluating something clever.
Where does the file go while the clever part happens
This is the question almost nobody asks. When your paralegal pastes three pages of a client letter into the box, that text leaves your building. Ask where it lands, who at the other end can read it, how long it is kept, and whether it is used to make the thing better for everybody else.
Ask the person selling it rather than the person setting it up, and ask in writing. The answers you want are plain: it stays with your firm’s account, it is not kept after the job, it teaches nothing, and somebody will put their name to that. Ask what happens to all of it on the day you stop paying.
If nobody can answer that in a sentence, that is your answer for now. Ask again next year. Most firms lose nothing by waiting, and if you would rather somebody looked — at this and at the three duller things — a review is ninety minutes on site, and the written report is yours either way.