I didnt go to law school to become the firm's unpaid IT help desk and yet here we are
Anybody else feel like they've slowly become the unofficial IT person at their firm? I don't mean like fixing the printer, I mean the person everyone asks when they can't figure out how to do something on their computer.
I'm a fifth year associate at a midsize firm. Somehow word got around that I'm "good with computers" because I set up a dual monitor once and knew how to merge PDFs without printing and rescanning them. Now I get pinged constantly. Partner down the hall can't figure out how to redline in Word. Another attorney keeps accidentally saving over old versions of documents and wants to know why her changes disappeared. Last week someone asked me to help them figure out why their e-filing kept getting rejected and it turned out they were uploading the wrong file type.
I honestly don't mind helping. But it's started eating into my actual billable work in a way that's hard to explain to anyone. You can't exactly put "taught Carol how to use Track Changes for the fourth time" on your timesheet. And the thing is, none of this is complicated stuff. It's basic document management, basic software. I walked past a paralegal's screen the other day and she had GitLaw open on one tab and like fourteen unsaved Word docs on another, and I just thought, we are all over the place as a profession when it comes to technology.
What gets me is that law school prepares you for exactly zero percent of the practical tech stuff you deal with every day. We had a whole semester on the Rule Against Perpetuities but nobody thought to mention "hey you should probably learn how to organize files so you don't lose a client's entire document history."
I'm not bitter about it, it's just funny. And a little exhausting. I keep thinking about whether I should put together some kind of informal training thing but then I imagine the attendance and enthusiasm level and I talk myself out of it.
Is this just a midsize firm thing or does everyone deal with this? Curious if bigger firms have actual support for this kind of stuff or if there's always just That One Person who becomes the reluctant help desk.