Information Overload

Visit a law firm and what strikes you - once you get past the fancy conference rooms, lined with law books bound in red and green leather - is the sheer number of boxes and files. Shelves groaning with them, endless boxes of binders, piled up in offices and corridors, stuffed with documents.

Law is a detail business, and you can never have too much of it at your fingertips. What's on page 38 of bundle C? Good lawyers know the answer. What keeps lawyers up at night is the fear of missing something, and the only solution is to read all the documents, no matter how dull they are.

The outcome of all this is that most lawyers drown in paperwork. The paperless office may have arrived but not at law firms, at least not yet. And the fear of missing something out means endless requests for more information. But for most lawyers, what they really want is less.