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An advertising puff for SOS Connect in Legal Futures recently trumpets the value of its software to a newly merged provincial law firm. Apparently, one of the virtues of the system is that it can be set up automatically to send  ‘performance v budget’ figures to each fee-earner on system start-up. Now I’ve no reason to suspect the firm in question isn’t a lovely place to work, full of commmitted lawyers doing a great job. And I’m sure they’re by no means the first to come up with this idea. But I have to say it would never have occurred to me that something as simple as this could be such a great way to build a culture of “healthy rivalry and competition” (to quote from SOS’s copy). Or that such a culture was necessarily so important to a law firm. I’d be far too bothered that it might encourage fee-earners to objectify clients and regard them as just the next pay cheque, and rather worried about the effect on an underperforming colleague of being confronted by his disappearing bonus/non-promotion/ pending P45 everytime he switches on his PC. But then this is clearly why I’m not part of the cut and thrust of modern practice 😉