Technology overload: It's on (and how to turn it off)

S.C. Lawyers Weekly staff
BridgeTower Media Newswires

In a world that’s always “on,” lawyers frequently go above and beyond. “Lawyers talk with me about working in firms where there is a culture of needing to be available 24/7. For example, if someone sends them an email at 3 a.m. and they haven’t responded by 4 a.m., they’re behind,” said Laura Mahr, founder of the mindfulness consulting practice Conscious Legal Minds. “This is real. This is not a couple of emails at night. There’s a 24/7 working expectation.”

Incessant technology use is a widespread societal issue far beyond law, even prompting the World Health Organization to include “burn-out” as an official “occupational phenomenon” in the International Classification of Diseases. The average person checks their phone 47 times per day while nearly two-thirds of the population looks at a device within 15 minutes of waking up, according to a 2017 study by Deloitte.

“The research can’t keep up with the technology,” said Dr. Christian Mauro, director of the Psychosocial Treatment Clinic at the Duke University Child and Family Study Center in Durham. While his research focuses mostly on “screens and teens,” the findings are broadly applicable. A common theme, he said, is skepticism about the efficacy of technology use. “Multitasking—is that really a thing, or are we just serial single-tasking at shorter and shorter periods?” Near-constant availability, Mauro said, could be creating work environments in which “we’re just doing more, not more efficiently.”

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The call is coming from inside the house

Concerns over burnout and technology overload have some attorneys asking whether a re-think might be in order—beginning with those cell phones.

“There are people in the world, and lawyers tend to be chief among them, who have a hard time turning off. Email made that worse, and mobile phones made that worse,” said Ed Walters, CEO and co-founder of Fastcase, one of the largest online law libraries in the world.

“Email on the mobile phone is the worst of all. Mobile phones have accelerated some toxic behavior ... The same person who would have a hard time at a dinner party talking about something other than work is now enabled by having that constant ping of their email or phone calls or Twitter or whatever it is.”

“Technology is great for establishing flexibility,” said Rachel Matesic, an attorney at Marcellino & Tyson in Charlotte. “But we do need to learn how to navigate a new set of boundaries.”

For instance, Matesic keeps email notifications off on her phone. She said she still checks her emails every couple of hours, even after-hours, “but I do it on my own terms ... As technology becomes more sophisticated, we all need to learn to rewrite what the rules are.”

Turning off notifications or putting away devices at a certain time of day can help, but Mahr said there doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach. Setting boundaries can be a step toward using technology to recharge, not overwhelm.

“One thing that’s awesome about technology is it can, if used correctly, create mood breaks throughout the day.”

Mahr suggested attorneys put their favorite music on their phones, or photos of their loved ones and places they’ve traveled. Rather than taking a brief-writing break to check social media or reading a news alert—actions that are “a diversion and not an actual restoration”—taking a moment to listen to a favorite song or glancing at photos of one’s personal life can actually be restorative.

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The personal me and the professional me

But social media is more than a diversion, it’s also another tech aspect to manage. “Your professional and personal life are connected in a way that they probably weren’t 15-20 years ago,” Matesic said. She has chosen to use the connection as a sort of digital cocktail party and found useful personal and professional development opportunities through social media, without stressing about maintaining a certain image.

“For a long time, I wanted to keep my Facebook personal and my LinkedIn professional,” Matesic said. “But now, I see that it’s beneficial to use all of my social networks just to be me. Both the personal me and the professional me.” From client referrals to interesting workshops, “I’ve made connections with acquaintances who I maybe wouldn’t have stayed in touch with.”

Of course, it’s helpful to keep in mind that there are plenty of ways that technology, when used correctly, has made attorneys’ jobs and lives vastly easier, too.

“I think a lot of attorneys fall down on understanding the technology that they already have,” Walters said. There are simple ways to embrace technology to make work “less stressful and more productive,” such as using the Styles tool in Microsoft Word instead of hand-formatting documents.

More sophisticated forms of technology, such as artificial intelligence, can save and optimize work time. Walters said the “responsibilities of confidentiality, competence, and diligence” today require lawyers to work as efficiently as possible for clients. “A law firm that is in a large litigation, when faced with a giant discovery task, may no longer be meeting its duty of competence or its duty of diligence to have an army of paralegals going through documents page by page in a world where electronic recovery has proven to have higher accuracy and higher recall than human review.”

Staying constantly connected typically happens in tandem with adopting cloud-based technology. Many law firms remain slow to embrace cloud-based software, often citing safety concerns, but it’s time to flip that script, Walters said.

“Cloud-based systems – Clio, Amazon, Microsoft – have security experts, and they have way better intrusion detection than the server sitting in the closet in the back of your office … I think, for the most part, when set up correctly, cloud computing has the potential to be more secure than on-premises data hosting.”

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Hey, you, get off of my cloud

Working off of the cloud can be a slippery slope, however, especially where legal communications and marketing is concerned. “There are some great free resources available,” Matesic said, but it’s important to understand if they’re in exchange for information security. Luckily, here the legal field has an advantage. “If you don’t have an understanding, you can always look at the terms of use of a product, or talk directly to the product’s developers to establish the security necessary for your firm.”

The goal with technology, on both a personal and professional level, is to enhance, and not drain, performance. Whether establishing data security or setting availability boundaries, it boils down to personal awareness and accountability.

Mahr said she sometimes recommends enacting firm-wide “blackout hours,” when no digital communication is to be sent or received. But even then, “there’s the firm policies that don’t necessarily line up with firm practices. For ‘blackout hours’ to be effective, there needs to be individual and leadership accountability.”

“Most firms don’t hand out an edict that says, ‘You will always be on your cell phone,’” Walters said. “Culture and expectations are the collective sum of all the decisions made by the people in the law firm.”

That goes for late-night emails and workflow optimization alike. Ultimately, attorneys are still human.

“Our clients expect us to be expert, but they don’t expect us to be invulnerable. They don’t expect that there is nothing that lawyers can learn,” Walters said. “Having a learners’ mindset ... can enable lawyers to be well, to keep up with the times, to educate themselves more, to be comfortable with the fact that we don’t know everything and that that’s OK.”