“At one time, three days was a reasonable response time. With the advent of e-mail, it was shortened to something more on the order of three hours and now with wireless connectivity it may be 30 minutes.” I ran across this quote but regrettably am unable to give its provenance.
It strikes me that once law departments have online access to work product and knowledge systems of law firms, response time may come down to three minutes. With online templates and guides as well as decision analysis tools and expert systems, that might fall to three seconds.
It’s Moore’s Law applied to legal alacrity; put differently, getting “moore” done in less time for a client (See my post of Feb. 20, 2008: lack of responsiveness as primary complaint behind firing a firm.).
But even so, people do not think faster.