By Jeffrey T. Donner, Esq.

I have been practicing law for nearly 27 years. Over that time, I have watched the civil justice system become steadily more bureaucratic, more standardized, more process-driven, and, in many ways, less intelligent.

That is not a complaint about technology itself. Technology should have made litigation simpler. It should have reduced clerical burden, increased access to information, and freed lawyers and judges to spend more time thinking about facts, law, strategy, and justice.

Instead, too often, technology has done the opposite. It has multiplied procedure. It has created redundant systems. It has made lawyers do the same thing twice. It has trained clients to expect instant answers to problems that still require real human judgment. And it has contributed to a legal culture in which form increasingly overwhelms substance.

That trend is not new. It has been building for decades. But it has now reached the point where it deserves to be called out plainly.

E-FILING WAS SUPPOSED TO MAKE THINGS EASIER

Electronic filing was supposed to simplify practice. Once courts moved from paper files to digital dockets, one would think the obvious result would be fewer administrative steps, fewer duplicate transmissions, and fewer local quirks.

After all, everyone knows judges have ready access to the docket. Lawyers see judges pull up filings in court all the time. The entire point of e-filing was that documents would be available instantly, centrally, and uniformly.

Yet modern practice often requires lawyers to do everything twice.

You e-file the motion. Then you separately upload it somewhere else. In one jurisdiction, you use CourtMap. In another, a different scheduling platform. In another, you email the judicial assistant. In another, you are told never to email the judicial assistant. Some judges want courtesy copies by email. Some want them through a portal. Some want a proposed order in Word format. Some want a PDF. Some still require a separate cover letter on formal “letterhead,” even though nobody is printing anything and the whole thing is going straight into a digital system anyway.

So what exactly did technology simplify?

In many instances, it did not simplify anything. It merely created another layer.

THE SYSTEM HAS BECOME A PATCHWORK OF MINI-SYSTEMS

One of the most frustrating features of modern litigation is the lack of uniformity. We have statewide rules. We have e-filing. We have digital dockets. We have instant access to documents. Yet every county, and often every judge, operates with a slightly different set of administrative rituals.

Miami-Dade has its own system. Broward has a similar but different one. Other circuits have their own portals, preferences, checklists, standing orders, hearing procedures, and unwritten customs. Some divisions require specific forms for evidentiary hearings. Some require certificates of conferral. Some require special cover correspondence. Some have pages and pages of procedures that litigants and lawyers must navigate before they can get a motion in front of the court.

That is not modernization. That is codified inconsistency.

A lawyer should not need to study a judge’s private operating manual the way one studies local folklore. A motion should be a motion. A filing should be a filing. A hearing request should be a hearing request. The more that routine litigation practice depends on judge-specific micro-procedures, the less we have a court system and the more we have a network of customized administrative kingdoms.

WE NOW SPEND TOO MUCH TIME PROVING THAT WE DID THE THING EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS WE DID

Modern practice is saturated with certifications.

We certify we conferred. We certify we attempted to confer. We certify that the matter is or is not opposed. We certify service through a system that already records service. We certify use or non-use of AI. We certify compliance with procedures that often add little or nothing to the court’s understanding of the merits.

The certificate of service is a perfect example of how this trend has moved backward under the guise of progress.

It used to be that a certificate of service actually told you something useful. It would identify the lawyers who were served. It gave practical information. A court reporter could look at a notice of deposition and know who the other lawyers were. A new lawyer coming into a case could read the certificate and orient himself.

Now, in many cases, the certificate of service is reduced to some version of “filed through the e-portal,” which tells the reader almost nothing. Everyone already knows it was e-filed. The system itself records that. So a document that once conveyed useful real-world information has become another empty ritual.

That is a small example, but it reflects a larger problem: modern legal procedure increasingly requires lawyers to say things the system already knows, in formats the system already has, to satisfy requirements that no longer serve much practical purpose.

FORM HAS OVERTAKEN SUBSTANCE

There was a time when practicing law felt more like practicing judgment. Lawyers were expected to know the record, know the law, and think carefully. Procedure existed, of course, but it did not dominate the profession the way it does now.

Today, too much of practice feels like compliance work.

Did you upload it to the right system? Did you attach the right form? Did you use the right county-specific platform? Did you send the right courtesy copy the right way? Did you include the right certification? Did you observe the judge’s personal preferences? Did you phrase the email the right way? Did you comply with page 6 of the division procedures?

Those things may seem minor standing alone. But they accumulate. They consume time. They increase cost. They create traps. And they move the center of gravity away from the actual work of being a lawyer: analyzing facts, applying law, making arguments, evaluating risk, and exercising judgment.

The legal profession should be difficult because law is difficult. It should not be difficult because administration has become a parallel profession.

GOVERNMENT NATURALLY TENDS TO JUSTIFY ITS OWN PROCESS

Some of this is simply institutional drift. Government systems tend to create procedure because procedure justifies the system. More forms. More internal order. More standards. More checklists. More certifications. More protocols. More documentation of compliance.

From the inside, each piece may seem reasonable. From the outside, especially from the perspective of a private-practice lawyer and a paying client, the cumulative effect is exhausting.

Private lawyers do not get paid by the public treasury to navigate bureaucracy for its own sake. We support our families and our staff with private dollars paid by clients who are already under financial pressure. Every extra layer of process costs money. Every unnecessary form costs money. Every redundant step costs money. The court may experience these requirements as ordinary administration. The client experiences them as a larger bill.

That difference matters.

TECHNOLOGY SHOULD HAVE FREED US TO THINK MORE. INSTEAD, IT OFTEN FORCES US TO CLICK MORE.

This is what makes the current moment so frustrating.

Modern technology should have liberated lawyers from drudgery. With searchable dockets, electronic filing, digital records, and instant communication, lawyers should be spending more time thinking and less time managing clerical nonsense.

Too often, the opposite has happened.

The old paper world at least had a certain honesty to it. You mailed or hand-delivered things. You served by fax and mail. You knew what had to be done. The process was physical, but it was straightforward. Technology should have made that process easier.

Instead, it often created duplication. We now “serve” through automated systems, but also separately notify. We e-file into a system everyone can access, but still have to separately route documents through another administrative channel. We create PDFs of “letterhead” documents that will never exist on paper. We spend time on packaging and routing rather than on thought.

That is not modernization in any meaningful sense. It is digitized bureaucracy.

AI HAS MADE THE EXPECTATION PROBLEM EVEN WORSE

Artificial intelligence has added a new layer to all of this, and not a healthy one.

AI is a tool. It is not magic. It is not a substitute for legal judgment. It is not a substitute for reading the actual record, verifying the law, or deciding whether a filing is something a lawyer can responsibly sign.

But clients increasingly see AI and assume that all legal work should now happen instantly.

A task that would have legitimately taken 20 hours, or two or three days of careful work, is now treated as something that should be done the same afternoon because a machine can produce a summary or a draft in a few minutes.

That is not how competent lawyering works.

Lawyers have already been embarrassed, sanctioned, and publicly humiliated for filing AI-generated material they did not independently verify. And rightly so. A lawyer’s signature is not a rubber stamp. When a lawyer signs a pleading, he is representing that he believes in its contents with his own brain, based on his own professional judgment.

That obligation has not changed. If anything, it matters more now.

AI should help lawyers work better. It should not pressure lawyers to abandon the discipline that makes legal work trustworthy in the first place.

WE HAVE LOST SOMETHING OF THE CRAFT OF THE PROFESSION

Part of what troubles me is that modern lawyers have been deprived, at least to some extent, of the experience of practicing law as a true intellectual craft.

Older generations of lawyers, whatever their own limitations, got to experience law in a way that was more centered on judgment, thought, and written advocacy and less dominated by procedure for procedure’s sake. They were not constantly navigating layers of digital administration, local micro-rules, compliance certifications, and redundant platforms. They were not expected to instantaneously convert machine-generated material into signed court filings. They were not submerged in quite the same volume of process noise.

I do not romanticize the past. The old system had its inefficiencies too. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the profession has become less elegant, less dignified, and less intellectually satisfying as procedure has metastasized.

We do not get to experience the specialness of being a lawyer in quite the same way. Too much of the job now feels like document-routing, platform-monitoring, certification-drafting, and procedural risk management.

That is a loss.

THIS IS NOT JUST A LAWYER COMPLAINT. IT IS A CLIENT PROBLEM.

Some readers may think this sounds like lawyers complaining about inconvenience.

It is not.

This is a client problem because all of this costs money. Clients pay lawyers to solve legal problems, not to spend half their day navigating administrative clutter. Every unnecessary procedural burden increases the cost of litigation. Every redundant system increases delay. Every local variation in process creates inefficiency that the client ultimately funds.

That is especially true for solos and small firms. Large institutional firms can absorb administrative drag more easily. Smaller firms and solo practitioners cannot. That means a system overloaded with bureaucracy tends to favor size over efficiency and scale over judgment.

That is not good for clients. It is not good for the profession. And it is not good for justice.

WHAT SHOULD CHANGE

We do not need less order. We need less unnecessary procedure.

We need more uniformity across courts and divisions.

We need fewer redundant systems, not more.

We need fewer certifications that merely restate what the system already records.

We need to stop pretending that every technological addition is an improvement merely because it is digital.

We need to remember that the purpose of procedure is to facilitate decision-making, not to become a parallel industry.

And we need to resist the growing pressure—fueled partly by AI and partly by bureaucracy—to treat legal work as if it were instantaneous clerical output rather than professional judgment.

FINAL THOUGHT

The practice of law should be about thinking, judgment, advocacy, and responsibility.

Technology should support that. Procedure should support that. Courts should support that.

Too often today, they do not.

Instead, the profession is asked to do more packaging, more compliance, more certification, more routing, and more administrative repetition, all while clients increasingly expect instant answers because machines can produce instant words.

That is not progress.

Progress would mean using technology to reduce friction, simplify process, lower cost, and give lawyers and judges more room to use their brains.

Until that happens, much of what passes for modernization in the legal system is really just more form, more bureaucracy, and less law.