Extract from Aidan Macnab’s article “Law Firm Tech Leaders on How Early Adoption Paid off During COVID”
After pandemic restrictions pushed the legal profession to embrace some its technological potential, law firm leaders are trying to figure out how to go further, and how to balance the old way of doing things with the new.
Hosted by Collin Smith, director of marketing at LexisNexis Canada, Canadian Lawyer convened a panel of the Canadian Law Awards’ finalists from the Best Use of Technology in a Law Firm Award. The panel included Charles Gluckstein, president of Gluckstein Personal Injury Lawyers; Cynthia Mason, founder and managing lawyer at Mason PC; Susan Wortzman, partner at MT>3, a division of McCarthy Tétrault; and Al Hounsell, solutions development team manager at Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP.
For the panellists, who have spent much of their careers searching for technological solutions to legal-practice problems, the shifts demanded by March 2020 were familiar territory and their early adoption produced opportunities as the rest of the industry caught up.
When Gluckstein began at the firm founded by his father, he said he had free reign to pursue his interest in technological innovations. By 2000, the firm was paperless and Gluckstein was involved with the Ontario Trial Lawyers Association and tech startups developing office management and customer relationship management (CRM) tools for client retention. He developed his own client portal, which allowed clients to log in, drag and drop documents, and view their case’s progress.
