The traditional law-firm structure has been largely unchanged since lawyers first banded together.

Attorneys travel to the office to put in their eight-to-12-hour days. A secretary is assigned to a partner, and also takes care of another associate or two, as time permits. Everyone works together in the same place as documents are generated and revised and discussed in person.

But, as technology alters the workplaces in other businesses, law firms (typically slow to embrace any technology revolution) are adjusting to become more competitive and, as Tony Rupp of Rupp Baase Pfalzgraf Cunningham & Coppola LLC notes, "not just take for granted that we have to do things a certain way because that's the way things have always been."

The advent of such technology as e-mail, PDAs, digital recording and transcription software, and Internet connectivity all have combined to change the face of business over a relatively short period of time. While most business models have evolved, the typical law-firm model is changing slowly, of necessity, to take advantage of these new technologies and employ them to make themselves more attractive to both their own clients and to the top-level law-school graduates that they hope to attract and hire.

"The client drives a lot of this innovation," said Raymond Stapell, managing partner of the Buffalo office of Harris Beach PLLC. "A huge number of high-end, sophisticated clients are using the same modes of communication, so they're almost requiring that those kinds of devices be available to them. In terms of flexibility, it's driven internally and externally."

Flex time, telecommuting

Law firms are already working aggressively to keep their female attorneys, in particular, happy with some telecommuting options.

"If you look at the students coming out of law school," notes Gary Schober, president and CEO of Hodgson Russ LLP, "the majority are women, and if we're going to attract these women, who are oftentimes at the top of their classes, to our firm, we must have an environment where we're able to offer them a rewarding legal career without precluding them from having a family as well, if that's what they choose."

And it's not just the lawyers who are benefiting from this relatively new flexibility. Firms are looking for ways to keep their long-term non-lawyer staff happy as well by offering less-than-full-time schedules and more understanding when last-minute crises arise.

"We all go through phases in our lives when our needs and schedules change," said Anthony Colucci III, managing attorney at Colucci & Gallaher. "If you start creating rules that don't include large segments of the population, then you might not be getting the best and the brightest; you're getting who you can get."

Hodgson Russ also offers some work-from-home options, on a limited basis.

"We have a relatively small handful of people who, in fact, do telecommute," Schober said. But, he cautions, while changing the prevailing law-firm culture may be difficult, it's crucial to make the attorneys comfortable with technological advancement, or it won't work.

"These issues aren't insurmountable," he said, "but they need to be addressed, and the solutions ultimately have to be solutions with which the professional people are comfortable."

Division of labor

Some firms are turning the typical attorney-secretary workflow model completely on its head in the hope of working smarter. Rupp Baase has recently revolutionized its firm structure by assigning to each secretary a "specialty" for which that secretary is chiefly responsible, and from which she or he is rarely distracted, rather than assigning each secretary to a specific attorney or two.

"We have secretaries specializing in different fields," Rupp said. "We have someone who's filing, someone who's calendaring, someone who's filing motions, and several typists who are concentrating on transcribing the dictation and producing the documents." While still in its infancy, the new workflow model has so far met with satisfaction from both the attorneys and the secretaries.

"Before," Rupp said, "every day, we'd have some secretaries swamped, and other secretaries with nothing to do. What we did made it more efficient - to have it work better, and work smarter, with fewer people. The work goes where it needs to be, and there's a better flow."

Striking a balance

A fine line is being walked between an all-out embrace of everything new and good about technology and an innate conservativeness that causes attorneys to balk at anything that is less than completely proven.

"Because we handle intellectual property and patents, and most of us have deep scientific and engineering backgrounds, we probably are more comfortable with technology than most," said Robert Simpson of Simpson & Simpson PLLC. "But for any professional firm, it's difficult. Law firms tend to be conservative, even stodgy. Because of lawyers' specialized educational background, they need IT people to run their technology for them. Lawyers, also, are trained to be very skeptical, and extremely protective of their clients' interests, so there are security concerns."

So, while the accelerating pace of innovation is helping firms to work smarter and offer some flexibility, the days of a paperless law office with no walls and large numbers working from remote locations is still far in the future.

"The disadvantages, and some of the reasons we are trailing (tech-savvy industries) is because practicing law at all levels is a relationship or people business," said Schober. "Our profession focuses on interaction internally, among ourselves, or externally, with clients or other lawyers. Because of this heavy dosage of people contact, it's hard to do the job without interacting with people, and interacting with people usually means being all in the same place, more or less."

Terri Parsell Hilmey is a Williamsville free-lance writer.