Australian lawyers say they are drowning in irrelevant documents and it makes them less efficient than their counterparts in other countries, drives graduates out of the profession and produces inaccurate bills.
Less than half of the information Australian lawyers receive is important for them to do their job, putting them behind their colleagues in the US, Britain, China and South Africa in a productivity study of 600 workers by the legal services company LexisNexis.
The internet and the photocopier have combined with the profession's love of paper in recent decades to create a situation where lawyers spend less than half of their day actually using documents and 54 per cent of it receiving, filing or otherwise managing them.
Australian legal professionals also came out ahead the other countries when asked if the amount of information they have to manage for their jobs has increased in the past five years (97 per cent), with eight in 10 reporting a significant increase.
The tide of paper and emails has an effect on clients' bills as well as the quality of lawyers' work, LexisNexis reported, and has led to problems with employee morale and customer service.
About four in five Australian lawyers surveyed said they had deleted or discarded correspondence, files or resources without fully reading them because there was too much to get through.
One in five said their research takes up so much time that they sometimes don't bill for it, while about one in three admitted at least once a week having trouble remembering how they spent their day when completing timesheets. Many new lawyers leave the law because the deluge is so intense, according to 43 per cent of lawyers polled.
Several judges who spoke to the Herald for a recent series blamed solicitors for the explosion in documents, saying they had become more aggressive in civil litigation and lacked the confidence to prioritise the main issues in cases since the demise of the articles training system.
But Mary Macken, the president of the Law Society of NSW, said Australians had really embraced internet information-sharing technology at work and it has had some effect on their efficiency in ''information-rich'' professions such as the law.
Lawyers need to ''work smarter'' and apply techniques, such as limiting access to their email addresses and adopting an an ''information via phone only'' policy on really busy days to avoid the ''tsunami of information''.
''I am not sure whether lawyers have become more aggressive, but certainly an angry email may have a longer-lasting impact because it is in black and white and indelible,'' Ms Macken said, quoting the Persian poet Omar Khayyam on the permanent effects when ''the moving finger writes''.
Marc Peter, the director of technology and business development at LexisNexis, which has sold workflow management software to almost 1000 Australian firms, said Australia had been slow to adopt the latest technology.
Some public sector legal aid and prosecution agencies in Queensland, Tasmania and the ACT had upgraded to the software but none in NSW had, he said.
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