Big Data Isn't The Only Thing Like Teenage Sex

Like many farm kids, I understood the basics of the birds and bees from a pretty early age. We had livestock and it hard to not notice two tons of bovine mating in your back yard.

Then, in between my sophomore and junior year of high school, we finally got cable (because the cable company finally ran line down our road.) By some miracle, my mother signed us up for HBO and the “documentaries” they showed late at night added some - let’s say color commentary - to my farm education.

So this is exactly how new lawyers and law students experience technology.

Any one under the age of 30 or so has pretty much grown up with technology being a integral part of their day to day. Which is not to say that they’re technologically savvy or that they understand it. Because they don’t. Not at all.

Back when I was a librarian, someone coined the term “The Four Horseman of Technology” to refer to Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google. Those four companies are how most people interact with technology and people love them because they’re dead simple to use. The person called them The Four Horseman because that was who libraries were competing against with their public facing technology. If your catalog or ebook check out process wasn’t as simple as Google or Amazon, people would hate it and not want to use it.

So, anyway, people have become accustomed to super easy technology. They have a general idea of what it does and how to use it. But what they actually do is very basic and utilitarian, like searching the Internet or writing a word doc.

But then, like late night HBO, they go to a conference or read a blog post and hear about AI or Blockchain or other absolute magic technologies that seem so much more exciting than what they use in their day to day. Maybe they need to use that and everything would be…better.

You don’t.

It won’t.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s a lot of room between “fundamentals” and “absolute buck wild” and 99% of you need to stick closer to the fundamentals side of things.

On related note, and what made me think of this today, is that I learned of a big tech failure. I don’t want to get into specifics. I don’t need to get into specifics. Legal/Civic/Ed tech is rife with products that not only “do not live up to their potential” but are, in fact, “actively bad.” Users are used to The Four Horseman and then they go to work and they’re cofronted with COBOL and DOS and it’s like Oregon Trail but you’re trying to do your job.

I can only assume that since many of these products have niche audiences the ROI isn’t there for companies that are big enough to hire people that understand what users need and want to bother with. Or they’re on that government contract gravy train and see no reason to be better.

It’s 2020 and we’re quickly approaching an entire generation that has been abused by terrible enterprise technology. I’m starting to worry that if we don’t change course soon, people won’t realize that they can do so much better. My “things to worry about” dance card is pretty much full, but this is on the list.

There’s a couple of people that use the mantra “bring back boring” or “unsexy” (or something like that) with regards to legal tech and innovation work. And, yes, absolutely, I wholeheartedly agree. And I guess I would add on to that “make it not suck.”

Oh, and if you wondering about the title of this post, it’s a play on this that was making the rounds a few years ago.

Image credit: By Distant Shores Media/Sweet Publishing, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18753676