Clarke just posted a quote from a memorandum on what the Secretary of Defense calls "evolutionary acquisition". I'm still waiting for the day when I don't get surprised by how few people are aware of DoD's bias for incremental and iterative development that they've had for several years already.

Last week I shared a cab from the airport with a lawyer. No, he didn’t carry a pitchfork nor did he have a pointy tail. After some time the discussion turned to the lawyer describing what seems to me a textbook example of the dangers of local optimization.

The modern lawyer does almost everything via email. Disputes are arbitrated by sending email back and forth, making adjustments to an electronic document rather than a printed sheet, etc. People would only meet a couple of times during a typical engagement—once to get things started and once for signing the papers.

Now, before computers were the norm, lawyers would travel across the city (or to another city altogether) for a meeting with the opposite party’s representatives. They would sit in meetings for long times, making small adjustments one after another. At the end of the day, they’d go home with the signatures on the paper, having scrapped half a dozen printouts of intermediary versions throughout the day.

Looking at the efficiency of a lawyer in these two scenarios, there’s a clear gap between the two. The lawyer with a computer and email would make the adjustments in a fraction of the time it takes the old-school lawyer to perform the work, not to mention the time it takes to travel to the train station, sit in the train, etc.

Yet, the old-school lawyer is better off in many ways. Why?

As you may have guessed by now, the answer lies in local optimization. The "e-lawyer" is efficient in the little things but faces a lot of problems that the old-school lawyer is much better prepared to resolve. Here’s a couple of examples.

Communication

Electronic communication is, while easy, very limited in terms of bandwidth. Some studies have estimated that email, for example, loses as much as 85-90% of the information we’d be able to receive through direct, face-to-face communication. It’s all that body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, and so forth, that we’re missing completely.

This issue is highlighted in legal disputes, contract negotations, etc. highly "official" engagements where the context pushes us towards using toned-down language, fine-tuning our words to not convey any unwanted meaning. The problem is, that fine-tuning results in us missing a lot of useful information about the emotions, real feelings, and real needs behind the deal. As a result, people end up interpreting each other wrong, minor disputes explode into battles larger than life, and so forth.

One party might "win" big time while the other feels screwed (sometimes rightly so) and the partnership doesn’t get exploited to its full potential. It’s a win-lose situation at best.

Waiting

The other example of how the old-school lawyer is better off has to do with waiting, one of the seven big wastes in any process. And it’s not the kind of waiting that involves hanging around at the airport or train station. It’s the kind of waiting that makes us lose windows of opportunity, miss whole markets, scrap enormous amounts of investments, etc.

It’s the kind of waiting that happens between the email savvy modern day lawyer writing an email highly efficiently and actually getting a response from her counterpart. While it’s true that sometimes the other party might reply in just a few minutes, the more probable outcome is that the other party spends a good time reading the email word-to-word, looking out for a side-punch equivalent to the small print or whatever tricks those damn lawyers tend to pull.

That waiting—which happens a number of times during a typical negotation—is what makes the electronic communication such a bad medium for a lawyer to handle legal disputes. Whereas it would certainly be more costly (from a cost accounting point of view) to travel to a meeting in a remote location to refine a contract, the added costs are often overcome by the significant increase of chances of success in terms of reaching a win-win outcome and in a timely manner.

So, what can we learn from this?

No, it doesn’t make sense to claim that all lawyers should stop using email to do their work. Nor does it make any more sense to suggest that lawyers should do all their work through email. The whole point about this blog entry is to help you and me realize when we’re optimizing locally and hurting our bottomline in the process.

Next time you’re wondering whether you should just send an email instead of walking down the corridor, think twice. You might be optimizing locally.