Push Research: What It Is and Why It Matters (Part II)
The following is part two of a two-part series.
In our last post, we described what push research is. But now it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty. No matter how advanced or exciting any technology is, the first, last and most important question about it for practicing lawyers is the same: why does this matter to me?
Push research, it turns out, should matter a lot to practicing lawyers. That’s because it was developed to respond to a real and growing problem in the profession. Lawyers are “knowledge workers,” and as such we spend an inordinate amount of time seeking out information. In fact, attorneys spend one out of every three working hours researching the law.
For a long time, this was a good thing from the lawyers’ perspective. You could just bill that time to your client. But that’s no longer the case. A Mattern Associates report finds that only 25% of clients pay for legal research costs, and that number will only decrease in the coming years. This may be part of why, according to the 2017 Legal Trends Report from Clio, lawyers spend just 29% of each workday on billable work. For lawyers that want to improve that number, there is now a significant premium on performing research efficiently. Lawyers must balance that imperative with the continuous need to perform high-quality work.
Push research holds tremendous promise because it makes lawyer more efficient while improving the quality of their work, by ensuring lawyers don’t miss cases or lines of argument that they might otherwise have missed. The ability of push research to serve the twin goals of efficiency and quality is what truly sets it apart, and promises that it will drive tremendous change.
The last decade, and especially the last few years, has seen an explosion in the fields of natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence that are creating genuinely new possibilities for attorneys. Even against this background, it’s difficult to overstate how transformative push research will be for the legal profession. Law firms leveraging this technology will be able to, for the first time, truly do more with less, and provide their clients with the highest-efficiency, highest-quality representation.
