BusinessReport.com

Back in the old days, when a lawyer or lawyer’s helper needed to bone up on a particular point of law, he or she would enter a place known as the “library” and consult something called a “book.”

That’s the way it was in 1983 when Charles McCowan helped launch Kean, Miller, Hawthorne, D’Armond, McCowan & Jarman. Maybe law books aren’t that obsolete yet, but they’re close. Everything’s gone electronic for crying out loud.

“Now the bulk of people here use computerized research, except us dinosaurs who don’t know how to do it,” McCowan says.

One of the firm’s founding partners and a 1967 graduate of LSU’s law school, McCowan says it represents just one of the many changes he’s seen as a practicing lawyer over the past 25 years.

There’s an upside: With the use of law books declining dramatically, the cost of maintaining the library has also declined. Paper, in general, is used less and less at Kean Miller. Other than pleadings, most communications from the firm are in e-mail form.

Without so many letters to type, the need for secretarial assistance has plummeted. McCowan’s secretary handles five people in all: three lawyers and two paralegals. Back in the day, he had two secretaries just for himself.

Technology has also impacted employees’ attitude toward balancing work and home life, he believes.

“I always said I was a terrible father because I worked all the time,” McCowan says. “I worked at least five-and-a-half days a week and maybe sometimes six-and-a-half days a week. Now people—I think because of technology becoming much more efficient—place a great deal more emphasis on their families and family life than we did, and, therefore, I think probably are better parents.”

As changes go, advertising is the elephant in the room. In the early 1980s, lawyers and law firms were identified in the phone book by simple, one-line listings. No box ads. Not even little ones. That all changed when the U.S. Supreme Court loosened the rules on attorney advertising.

Lately, in response to the view of some that things have gone over the top, the Louisiana State Bar Association has recommended to the state Supreme Court that what’s permissible in legal advertising be toned down a bit.

McCowan thinks Kean Miller’s ads are tasteful and necessary to maintain visibility in the marketplace. He’s aware not everyone would agree—including firm founder Gordon Kean, who died in 1992.

“It’s gotten to the point where Mr. Kean would be rolling over in his grave for what we do,” McCowan says. “My father-in-law, who was Dr. [Paul M.] Hebert at the law school, would be in an apoplectic fit, rolling on the floor if he saw some of this stuff.”

John W. Barton, a partner with Breazeale, Sachse & Wilson, received his law degree from LSU in 1976 and started practicing the same year. He says one of the biggest changes over the years is in the nature of the relationship among lawyers in Baton Rouge.

“It’s gotten a lot more impersonal, and it’s gotten a lot more competitive,” Barton says. “I guess those primarily are the two things I don’t like about the practice of law as it is today.”

Barton, who joined Breazeale Sachse in 1988, remembers when the duty court judge knew every lawyer in court and your parents would hear about it if you didn’t act right. With all the growth the city has experienced, now half the lawyers in court are strangers to each other, Barton says.

Also, when New Orleans law firms started moving offices into Baton Rouge, they brought a harder-edged style of practicing law. Things became meaner and more competitive, Barton says.

Before, if the lawyer on the side needed an extension or was having trouble answering a petition or whatever the case might be, it was OK to cut him or her some slack. New Orleans lawyers didn’t have time for such courtesies, an attitude that took hold in Baton Rouge as well, Barton says.

“That’s the way of the world these days,” he says. “It’s bigger, and you don’t know the folks as well.”

Arm in arm with that attitude and the explosion in advertising and marketing is a practice once considered taboo: calling on another firm’s client. It wasn’t illegal like advertising used to be. It was just considered bad etiquette.

“It was just not accepted,” Barton says. “If you took somebody else’s client out to go play golf, that wasn’t very kosher back in the old days.”

Now, like advertising, it’s commonplace. The dramatic increase in competition drives law firms to bend over backwards for their clients. If they don’t, another firm is waiting in the wings to snatch them.

Barton and McCowan agree diversity in hiring is much more of an issue than it used to be, and it’s becoming something corporations look for when signing on with a firm. McCowan says roughly half the attorneys in Kean Miller are women, a substantial increase from the early 1980s. Hiring sufficient numbers of minority attorneys remains a challenge for local firms.

“You see a lot more minorities coming through the work force now, but a lot of them, I think, are writing their own ticket,” Barton says. “If they have fairly good grades, they can go most anywhere they want and find a job. I’m sure a lot of them go to the larger cities.”

Shelby McKenzie, a partner with Taylor, Porter, Brooks & Phillips and a 1964 LSU law school graduate who has been an adjunct LSU law professor since 1971, says the practice of law has gotten much more complex in the last few decades, making it harder to get away with being a general practitioner.

Thus most law grads today head right into a specialty: environmental law, regulatory law, labor law. You name it. Clients now expect large firms to have a specialist for every occasion. That creates the need for more lawyers compared to 25 years ago. Taylor, Porter and the city’s other major firms have probably doubled in size since the ’80s, he notes.

“Business in general probably didn’t need as many lawyers because business was not as complicated,” McKenzie says. “There are areas of practice that have become very important that didn’t even exist then.”

So is there a surplus of lawyers or not?

“I don’t see any oversupply,” McKenzie says. “I think we’re certainly at capacity.”