Alan Kassan Partner Kantor & Kantor LLC, Northridge Kassan helps clients secure disability, long-term care and other benefits from their health insurance company. Last year he won a major case for a client who suffered from fibromyalgia and “bone death.” The 11-attorney firm represents clients with multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, AIDS and other degenerative diseases. What’s the biggest impact of digitalization? Going paperless. We have implemented a high-speed scanning and OCR (optical character reading) solution which has allowed our staff to do almost everything without touching paper. How does it affect your relationships with clients? By being paperless, we are able to access and analyze documents more quickly, which in turn allows us to serve our clients better. What is the biggest challenge of digitalization? The challenge is to take advantage of the digitization by enabling digital documents to be accessed from anywhere, and make them portable. This involves security issues on the access side and hardware issues on the portability side. What is the biggest opportunity? Law firms implementing the best solutions will be poised to offer clients cutting-edge services. As for portability, as the solutions become more high-tech, lawyers will be able to become more mobile, more efficient and probably more attractive to those looking for legal services. Does it affect the price of legal services? Like everything else, the cost of legal services will continue to rise. I do not believe progress will make the increases disproportional, however. The increase in efficiency and natural competition will keep costs at bay. Who are the biggest winners in the shift to digital? Lawyers who implement the best solutions, and their clients. The biggest losers? Lawyers who resist technology … and their clients. Have you laid off workers because of digitalization? No. We have been hiring. I would estimate the firm staff has grown by 15 to 20 percent. Have you offered any new services because of digitalization? Other than easier transmission of documents through digital means – beyond just email – instead of physical means, no. Has digitalization cut into your revenue? No. Do you write your own briefs (with software) or does an assistant do it? Lawyers write their own briefs. How will digitalization change the legal profession in the next decade? I wish I knew! My guess is that the technology will improve in spectacular ways. Large desktop computers will either disappear into the cloud or become tiny implements connected to company servers. Laptops will disappear. Tablets may even disappear. Screen technologies may eventually morph into projection technologies whereby we will all have tiny devices that will either project onto surfaces or onto our eyes using “Google glass” type tools. What we now think of as smart phones will be part of this wholesale integration of technology, but they will not so much be handheld devices. Instead, they will be integrated into our clothing or somehow designed to be worn in efficient, unobtrusive ways. The Internet will become ever more ubiquitous. We may even have robot staff! – Joel Russell
