You have to network to get work, a sentiment that still appears to hold true for lawyers looking to advance up the food chain at their existing law firm. While existing tech platforms such as experience management systems or even the more generic matter management or billing tools can be used to identify lawyers on staff whose skill set most closely aligns with a given task, those products are likely not being used to their fullest extent—yet.

Partners with a matter that needs assigning may still find it easier to simply look down the hall than consult a dashboard breaking down the number of hours a handful of associates has accumulated around a given subject area. However, with some law firms continuing to swell in size—and ranks—it's possible that technology could play a bigger role in matching attorneys with their next matter.

"That kind of walking down the hall culture, it will still be around. But it will have to change," said Jarno Vanto, a partner at Crowell & Moring.

In some respects it already has, just not on a wide scale. Various experience management systems, for instance, have typically been used across different industries to measure customer satisfaction, but have evolved to catalog the different kinds of experience that attorneys working inside a firm may have with regards to a particular subject matter.

Nathan Cemenska, director of legal operations and industry insights at Wolters Kluwer's ELM Solutions, said big consulting companies with larger staffs to manage tend to deploy these kinds of tools much more frequently than law firms. Still, he argued that even a global firm boosting 10,000 employees may not be large enough to justify the use of something like an experience management system, especially since interpersonal chemistry remains a vital part of team-oriented projects.

In fact, think of selecting an internal candidate from an experience management system like online dating. "You find a profile that on paper looks great, but then you actually meet the person and there's just no chemistry. You don't really want to meet the person. You don't even want to interact with them. You don't want to work with them. I think it's the same way in law firms," Cemenska said.

To be sure, not every tech-based method for linking the right attorney to the right matter necessarily requires an expensive new purchase. Tools that many law firms already have on hand—such as billing or matter management solutions—could potentially be repurposed to derive relevant statistics such as how many hours an employee has billed around a given niche of the law.

According to Cemenska, much of that relevant information already exists inside Wolters Kluwers' database. "But that isn't the way that we market our products right now, and I don't think many of our competitors do either," he said. So what's the hold up? The answer may simply be that the demand isn't in place. Cemenska pointed to tendency among lawyers and even some clients to stick with the people they've had positive interactions with before.

Vanto at Crowell indicated that he has yet to notice law firms making use of billing or matter management tools to source in-house talent, citing some of the potential problems such a data-centric approach could raise for the industry long term. "Certain issues would always go to the person or two individuals who are doing that work. … Then you would not enable anyone else to develop that talent or expertise in the firm if all that work went to that one person."

Still, he raised the specter of COVID-19—and the wave of remote working that may linger in the pandemic's aftermath—as a factor that could turn the tide. After all, it's harder to encounter talent face to face if it's not based in the office. Cemenska, on the other hand, argued that law firms are continuing to grow, with a greater number of attorneys necessitating tech-assisted skill searches.

"Law firms are getting bigger and bigger. They have to. And you're going to see more and more of this kind of technology and this way of looking at things. But I would say for the most part it's not going to be taking away from human relationships, I think it's going to be supplementing them," Cemenska said.