By Jeffrey T. Donner, Esq.

I am enough of a legal nerd that, before I ever went to law school, I checked Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The Common Law out of the public library and read it because I thought it would be fun.

That is not a normal thing to do. I understand that. But it tells you something about what attracted many of us to the law in the first place.

The law, at its best, is an intellectual profession. It involves judgment, language, history, analogy, persuasion, strategy, and disciplined reasoning. The great legal minds we still study — Holmes, Cardozo, Learned Hand, Rehnquist, Scalia, O’Connor, Thomas, Breyer, and others — are remembered because they had time to think, write, reason, and develop ideas.

They were not remembered because they were excellent at uploading PDFs into a government portal.

And that is where modern legal practice has gone sideways.

Technology Was Supposed to Reduce Clerical Friction. Instead, It Transferred Clerical Labor to Lawyers.

This is the core problem.

For decades, technology has been sold to lawyers as a productivity miracle. Computers would make us faster. Email would make communication easier. E-filing would make court filing more efficient. Case-management systems would reduce paperwork. Online portals would streamline everything.

Some of that is true.

But a large part of the modern technology revolution did not eliminate clerical work. It merely transferred the clerical work from trained staff to lawyers.

The work still exists. Someone still has to do it. Someone still has to convert the document, upload it, name it correctly, select the filing code, fill out the electronic fields, check the service list, confirm the PDF format, review the confirmation, save the notice, and make sure nothing went wrong.

Increasingly, that “someone” is the lawyer.

That is not technological progress. That is self-checkout with a bar card.

E-Filing Is the Perfect Example

E-filing is now accepted as normal. In many ways, it is convenient. I can file something at 11:58 p.m. without sending someone to the courthouse. That is useful.

But let’s not pretend the work disappeared.

When a lawyer files a new lawsuit through an e-filing portal, the lawyer often enters the party names (and addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers), selects the court, selects the division, identifies the case type, uploads the civil cover sheet or lets the system auto-generate it, enters service information, selects document types, pays the filing fee, and verifies the filing.

That is not magic. That is clerk work being pushed upstream onto the filer.

Years ago, you filed a complaint with the clerk. The clerk’s office opened the case. The clerk’s office entered information. The clerk’s office processed the filing. The clerk’s office did clerical work because that was, quite literally, the clerk’s job.

Now the lawyer does much of that work through a portal, and everyone calls it “efficiency.”

Efficient for whom?

The court system may need fewer people at the counter. The clerk’s office may shift work away from employees. The government may be able to process filings differently. But the labor did not vanish. It moved.

It moved to the lawyer.

And when the lawyer is a solo or small-firm lawyer, it moved directly to the person whose time is supposed to be spent analyzing facts, advising clients, drafting arguments, preparing witnesses, negotiating strategy, and trying cases.

The “Self-Service” Economy Came for the Legal Profession Too

This is not unique to law. It is everywhere.

At the grocery store, customers scan their own items.

At Home Depot, customers check themselves out while one employee monitors several machines.

At airports, passengers print their own boarding passes, tag their own bags, and troubleshoot kiosks.

At restaurants, customers scan QR codes, order through apps, and sometimes pay without meaningful human service.

Businesses call this innovation. Often, it is just labor transfer.

The customer does the work formerly performed by the employee.

The same thing happened in law offices and court systems. We dressed it up with words like “portal,” “workflow,” “automation,” “single session,” “dashboard,” and “user interface.” But the practical reality is simple: lawyers now perform enormous amounts of administrative and clerical work that prior generations of lawyers did not perform.

The Old Legal Giants Had the Same 24 Hours. They Just Had Fewer Mandatory Interruptions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Benjamin Cardozo, and Learned Hand had the same 24 hours in a day that modern lawyers have.

But their 24 hours were different.

They did not have to wrestle with browser compatibility, password resets, forced software updates, PDF/A conversion, corrupted uploads, e-service errors, electronic filing codes, court portal redesigns, or “look and feel” updates to systems that already worked.

They could sit, read, think, dictate, revise, and write.

There is an image — maybe exaggerated, but not entirely wrong — of the old lawyer or judge sitting in an office, feet on the desk, pipe in hand, dictating to a secretary who typed the letter, formatted the document, mailed the pleading, and kept the machinery moving.

That world is gone.

And it is not just gone for solos. Even in large firms, the staffing model changed decades ago. When I started practicing law in 1999, large firms were already operating with multiple lawyers assigned to one secretary. The old model, where one lawyer might have multiple staff members attending to administrative needs, had largely disappeared.

The modern lawyer is expected to be lawyer, secretary, filing clerk, IT assistant, PDF technician, billing assistant, scheduler, marketing department, and client-service department.

Then people wonder why lawyers feel constantly behind.

The Administrative Tax Is Real

If a lawyer loses one hour a day to administrative technology friction, that may not sound catastrophic at first. But over a career, it is enormous.

One hour per weekday is about 250 hours per year.

Over 25 or 26 years, that is roughly 6,000 to 6,500 hours.

That is not a minor inconvenience. That is years of professional life.

That is time not spent thinking about a case. Not spent preparing a witness. Not spent improving a brief. Not spent developing strategy. Not spent exercising. Not spent with children. Not spent reading. Not spent living.

It is a hidden tax.

And unlike taxes, nobody even admits they are imposing it.

Instead, every new system comes with cheerful language: “updated look and feel,” “enhanced user experience,” “new dashboard,” “refreshed interface,” “streamlined process.”

What that often means in real life is: the button moved, the login may break, the familiar workflow changed, and the lawyer gets to waste time figuring it out.

Court Technology Should Be Boring

There is a simple rule for court technology: if it works, leave it alone.

Court filing systems are not social media apps. They are not entertainment products. They are not consumer gadgets. They are infrastructure for access to the courts.

A filing portal should be stable, reliable, fast, and boring.

Lawyers use these systems under deadline pressure. We are not browsing for fun. We are not looking for a “fresh experience.” We are trying to file pleadings, serve parties, protect clients, and comply with court rules.

The best e-filing system is the one the lawyer does not have to think about.

When a system works, unnecessary redesign creates risk. It creates login problems, user confusion, training burdens, support tickets, filing errors, and wasted time. That may seem small to the people managing the project. It is not small to the lawyer trying to file something before a deadline.

The Legal Profession Has Confused Access With Efficiency

I am not anti-technology. Quite the opposite. I use technology aggressively in my practice. Used properly, it can make legal work faster, sharper, and more accessible.

But we should stop pretending every technological change is an improvement.

Real efficiency means reducing unnecessary work. Fake efficiency means making someone else do the work and calling the system improved.

E-filing gave lawyers access. It also made lawyers do more clerical work.

Email made communication faster. It also created an expectation of instant response.

Online portals made records searchable. They also created more logins, more passwords, more interfaces, and more points of failure.

Document software made editing easier. It also turned lawyers into formatting technicians.

The issue is not whether technology is good or bad. The issue is whether technology actually reduces the lawyer’s burden or merely shifts the burden onto the lawyer.

Too often, it is the latter.

This Is Not Nostalgia. It Is a Productivity Problem.

This is not a complaint that the old days were better in every respect. They were not. No serious lawyer wants to go back to carbon paper, courier runs, or physically sending someone to the courthouse every time a document must be filed.

But there is a difference between useful modernization and change for the sake of change.

A stable filing system that allows lawyers to search cases, find filings, access service lists, and submit documents quickly should not be redesigned merely because someone wants to refresh the interface.

Lawyers do not need prettier portals. We need reliable portals.

We do not need government agencies or vendors creating new learning curves for systems that already work. We need them to understand that every unnecessary change imposes real costs on the lawyers and litigants who depend on those systems.

The Bottom Line

The promise of legal technology was that it would reduce clerical friction.

The reality is that much of it transferred clerical labor to lawyers.

That distinction matters.

A lawyer’s highest value is not clicking buttons. It is judgment. It is strategy. It is advocacy. It is knowing which facts matter, which arguments will persuade, and which risks the client must understand.

Every hour spent fighting unnecessary administrative technology is an hour stolen from the actual practice of law.

Oliver Wendell Holmes had time to write The Common Law. Benjamin Cardozo had time to think deeply about duty, causation, equity, and the development of legal principles. Learned Hand had time to write opinions that lawyers still read generations later.

Modern lawyers get the same 24 hours.

But too often, before we can do the real work, we first have to reset the password, update the browser, convert the PDF, navigate the portal, select the filing code, check the e-service box, and hope the government’s “new and improved” system still lets us do today what we could do yesterday in five seconds.

That is not progress.

That is clerical labor in a Halloween costume calling itself innovation.