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Lawfirm Employee Surveillance?


Ryders123

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Ryders123
  • Articling Student

Came across this article today: https://financialpost.com/fp-work/ontario-pledges-to-become-first-province-to-protect-workers-from-digital-spying-by-bosses

It mentions some employers using various programs that track employee productivity, such as key strokes etc.

 

Do you think law firms are doing this to keep tabs on lawyers?

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I don't work at a law firm, but I do work in a law department, and we are trying to figure out what this might mean. Obviously everything you do on a work laptop leaves digital breadcrumbs. If we wanted to, we could look up when you logged on and off, when you were sending emails, what websites you have visited, what documents you opened, closed, saved, etc. All that stuff goes through our servers and gets saved for varying lengths of time. Some disappear pretty much right away, others will last pretty much forever.

And we will look those things up if we have some legitimate need to investigate. But we don't track them or do any metrics on them or anything like that. Are we "monitoring them online"?

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The fingerprint is creepy, but at every law firm you have a swipe card that has your name in its data. The firm doesn't collect any more or less data about your coming and going with the fingerprint. I understand why employees don't want to give up their fingerprints, but don't understand why anyone thinks that fingerprints are some key to tracking this information.

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Turtles
  • Law Student
3 hours ago, Ryders123 said:

Came across this article today: https://financialpost.com/fp-work/ontario-pledges-to-become-first-province-to-protect-workers-from-digital-spying-by-bosses

It mentions some employers using various programs that track employee productivity, such as key strokes etc.

 

Do you think law firms are doing this to keep tabs on lawyers?

I'm not sure what the point would be if you're billing and clients are paying your bills. That's a much more meaningful measure of productivity than keystrokes.

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Mountebank
  • Lawyer
On 2/25/2022 at 2:10 AM, Turtles said:

I'm not sure what the point would be if you're billing and clients are paying your bills. That's a much more meaningful measure of productivity than keystrokes.

Especially considering my judicious use of the "Backspace" key when writing to opposing counsel.

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t3ctonics
  • Lawyer

 

I don't see how it would be worthwhile for law firms to use these methods for productivity tracking. A lot of these things just wouldn't be useful metrics for tracking lawyer productivity. Any non-computer work wouldn't be tracked, which would include things like court appearances, closings, and physical document review, but also meetings and phone calls, which are often a significant part of lawyers' time. And then many people still work with paper documents on their files, especially for review and revision, and use physical books for research.

In an investigation it could potentially be worthwhile to look at logs after the fact for the things @Jaggers mentioned. I've worked on cases using evidence like keycard swipe logs, computer logins, emails sent, network drives accessed, and building surveillance footage, but we'd only ever look at those things if we had some reason to start an investigation. For example, in one case an employee received a very offensive and out-of-character email from another employee, who denied sending it. When we looked through the various logs we concluded that the employee wasn't even in the office when the email was sent, and someone else had logged on to their computer and sent the email. Through the logs and building entrance video, we were also able to deduce who the culprit was.

For productivity it's like @Turtles said - billing and receipts are what matter. In an in-house position it would just be that you are dealing with inquiries in a reasonable timeframe.

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