On the latest episode of The Geek In Review:
Laurent Wiesel, Founder and CEO of Justly, talks with us about leaving his BigLaw partnership to create a startup focused on litigation analytics. Wiesel discusses how he saw that there was a growing gap between what clients were asking on issues of pricing and process, and what law firms were able to deliver. Greg (@glambert) talks about his ability to post an actual written blog post this week about who is the customer.
If you haven’t checked out Jason Barnwell’s podcast The Business of Law yet, Marlene (@gebauerm) suggests that you do. Jason has an extended interview our episode 11 guest, Jae Um.
Marlene also suggests checking out Gimlet Media’s Casting Call. Casting Call is a reality audio series that chronicles the search for the next great podcast host.
Marlene is speaking at the ARK Group Knowledge Management conferencein New York, October 23rd-24th. There are some other good speakers there, but really, Marlene’s talk is worth the price of admission alone.
Remember to take time to subscribe via iTunes, or Google Play , or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Marlene Gebauer: Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast designed to cover the legal information profession. with a slant toward technology and management. I’m Marlene Gebauer.
[00:00:17] Greg Lambert: And I’m Greg Lambert. Marlene, I did something unusual this week.
[00:00:21] Marlene Gebauer: You did?
[00:00:22] Greg Lambert: I did. I actually used the three geeks in a law blog platform to write an actual blog post. That’s crazy, right?
[00:00:30] Marlene Gebauer: You finally managed to write a real post and not just like, hey, listen to our podcast.
[00:00:35] Greg Lambert: I know. I was really motivated this week.
[00:00:37] Marlene Gebauer: I’m impressed.
[00:00:38] Greg Lambert: So I was reading an article by Mark Cohen on Forbes website where he was writing about an issue with legal innovation. He said that one of the reasons, and believe me, there are many, why law firms struggle with keeping pace with business innovation is that there are too many lawyers involved in the legal delivery and too few logistics, supply chain and management experts and technologists. and program managers, data analysts and other professionals and paraprofessionals in the mix. So after reading this, I was all excited because this fit the narrative that we talk about a lot on the show, as well as the narrative of organizations like Clock, you know, because logistics is literally in their name. and the ACC Value Challenge. So I’m all hyped up. But then Jeff Carr, who’s a renowned alternative fees guy and former GC for FMC Technology, as well as our recent interviewee, Jae Um, both of them burst my bubble and got me thinking in a completely different direction when I was done. Yeah, so, you know, typical day for me. So Jeff and Jae mentioned that when it comes to innovation within the law firms, it’s not that there’s too many lawyers that are involved, but rather that the working partners and working lawyers are actually missing from the equation. Jeff refers to it as massive consumer confusion or MCC.
[00:02:14] Marlene Gebauer: Acronym alert, acronym alert.
[00:02:16] Greg Lambert: Yeah, I had to like Google that. So the real consumer for the innovation is the working attorneys. not the firm’s clients. And I got to say on a side note with Jeff, he said we should stop calling them clients and start thinking of those customers. and start thinking of those customers. But hey, that’s a whole nother podcast, so we won’t worry about that.
[00:02:35] Marlene Gebauer: I got to retrain myself.
[00:02:36] Greg Lambert: All right. Alright, so long story short, the working partners and attorneys are the consumers of most of the innovations created within the law firm, but they tend to be missing from the conversation, especially around the issues of evaluation, implementation, and just the general conversation of what innovation needs to occur to help them. That means that the innovators, which Mark Cohen discussed, you remember we were talking about his Forbes article earlier.
[00:03:03] Marlene Gebauer: Yes.
[00:03:03] Greg Lambert: Yeah, back to that. So all of the innovators need to start knocking on the doors of the working attorneys and dragging them into the process. I also got a tip that if you can somehow get the clients to also knock on the door and tell them to be part of the innovation, that’s even better.
[00:03:19] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, I think you really hit the nail on the head that it’s really both ideas. I mean, I think you really hit the nail on the head that it’s really both ideas. Both ideas are applicable. I mean, of course, the consumers of internal firm innovation should be part of that process. I would hope we don’t have to drag them. I hope that whatever innovations we’re trying to put in place are things that are easy for them to use, that basically roll fairly seamlessly into their workflow where it really is a benefit to them. Similarly, if clients can start discussing with their firms what they would like to see in terms of innovation, that can help to direct the firms even more.
[00:03:59] Greg Lambert: Absolutely.
[00:04:04] Marlene Gebauer: So Greg, I listened to Jason Barnwell from Microsoft on the Business of Law podcast. So first of all, that’s a damn good podcast.
[00:04:12] Greg Lambert: That’s a great podcast. I enjoy Jason’s podcast a lot.
[00:04:15] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, I am binging on it now. It’s very data rich and the discussion is really getting me thinking about some ideas. The first of which is that I need a good tool to tab audio in podcasts. In these podcasts, you want to go back to these sections and listen again to what people said and then I can never find it again. It’s not like I’m taking notes when I’m listening to this.
[00:04:36] Greg Lambert: Especially if it’s an hour and 15 minute long podcasts like Jason’s last one was.
[00:04:37] Marlene Gebauer: Especially if it’s an hour and 15 minute long podcast like Jason’s last one was.
[00:04:41] Greg Lambert: That’s right.
[00:04:42] Marlene Gebauer: That’s right. I need this tab because, and I can’t remember if it was Rebecca Benavidez, who’s the director of legal business at Microsoft, or Jae Um, who’s the executive director of Six Par Six, and who we have interviewed, that customers need to tell their firms, as I said before, what they need to see in terms of innovation. Rebecca, I know, gave some good examples and some were not so complex. Things like CLEs on hot topics, playbooks, secondments. And this was an interesting one, succession plans for attorney support. As attorneys who are working on their projects advance in their careers, how are juniors being trained up to assume their roles? I thought that was really interesting because it suggests that they don’t want to jump from one firm to the next. They want to have this succession in this relationship.
[00:05:26] Greg Lambert: Yeah, that’s a good idea. And just to play off on the secondments, that’s something that I know that in-house counsel would love to see more of. And on a side note with that, with the number of researchers that are on staff, it’s been one of the things that we thought about doing with the research staff is offering some secondments for them. I think it would be a good experience both for the client and for us.
[00:05:53] Marlene Gebauer: I know clients are asking for research secondments. This is definitely an area where we’re going to see development and where I think libraries and research departments have some opportunities. And speaking of podcasts, I have another one for you and our listeners to try out.
[00:06:17] Greg Lambert: All right. I like podcasts.
[00:06:19] Marlene Gebauer: You are a podcast junkie.
[00:06:21] Greg Lambert: I am.
[00:06:22] Marlene Gebauer: Casting Call, new podcast from Squarespace and Gimlet Creative. They host the platform for many good podcasts like Reply All, Every Little Thing, Science Verses, and for those with kids or not, Story Pirates.
[00:06:37] Greg Lambert: Story Pirates. I’ve never heard that one.
[00:06:40] Marlene Gebauer: True story. I have a Story Pirates t-shirt.
[00:06:42] Greg Lambert: Of course you do.
[00:06:44] Marlene Gebauer: Of course I do. Now, Casting Call is a reality audio series that chronicles the search for the next great podcast host. podcast host. And you can vote and the winner is going to be announced on October 3rd. So that’s coming up. Now, Greg, I was going to nominate you, but the entry deadline had passed.
[00:07:01] Greg Lambert: Oh, that’s a shame. I’ll have to go on the next season.
[00:07:05] Marlene Gebauer: Next year.
[00:07:06] Greg Lambert: So, Marlene, this week we talk with another legal startup leader, Laurent Weisel, about his litigation analytics tool called Justly. Now, I’ve known Laurent for a couple of years now, and I think it was Toby Brown that introduced us at the time. And he is one smart dude. In fact, a little too smart for me sometimes, because I got to like hold my hands up when he’s trying to explain things to me and say, say, Whoa, you know, explain it to me like I’m a second grader, you know, which is about my speed.
[00:07:34] Marlene Gebauer: He’s a very smart guy and it’s a very interesting listen.
[00:07:37] Greg Lambert: Yeah, we had a great talk with him. And I think anyone that’s wondering about how analytics can play a role within the law firms, litigation especially, and even fit under the legal information umbrella like we control, this is the interview for you.
[00:07:52] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah.
[00:07:53] Greg Lambert: So let’s jump in.
[00:07:55] Marlene Gebauer: Okay, listen up. Today we welcome lawyer turned analytics geek, the founder and CEO of Justly, Laurent Weisel. Hi, Laurent.
[00:08:08] Laurent Wiesel: Hi, Marlene.
[00:08:09] Marlene Gebauer: Welcome to the podcast.
[00:08:11] Laurent Wiesel: Thank you so much. It’s an honor to be here.
[00:08:14] Marlene Gebauer: Laurent, tell our audience a little bit about your background, moving from big law partner to startup founder. That was about three years ago, right?
[00:08:21] Laurent Wiesel: Yeah. I started my career at Sullivan and Cromwell as a litigator. I practiced there for almost 10 years and then was a litigation partner at McGuire Woods. During those years, I learned a lot about the legal industry and saw industries around me changing and thought, well, you know, this industry is also ripe for change. And with a little bit more vision around that, I left in 2015 to start Justly, like I said.
[00:08:54] Greg Lambert: Laurent, during your time at Sullivan and Cromwell or even at McGuire Woods, what were your experiences that led you to leave that behind in order to start Justly?
[00:09:04] Laurent Wiesel: I guess the main thing was I recognized that there was a growing gap between what clients were asking of their law firms and what law firms at the time were able to deliver. Specifically around litigation, clients had a lot of questions around predictability of timelines of costs, and it was the inability of my firm, really all firms to respond to those types of questions that I sought to solve initially from within the firm. And then once I realized that might not be possible, I decided to do it firm without.
[00:09:51] Greg Lambert: So clients were asking you to give them what you were going to work on, how you were going to do it, how long it was going to take, and how much was it going to cost? That’s just outrageous to ask.
[00:10:02] Laurent Wiesel: Yeah, I mean, the most typical requests that you hear now more and more is for a budget at the beginning of a matter, and a budget is closely tied to a timeline of events. The major events in the case are the deliverables for a legal engagement or a flat fee proposal. Clients want to know what something will cost specifically, and hourly estimates are not quite cutting it anymore.
[00:10:31] Marlene Gebauer: Now, I’m wondering, does that, you think, have anything to do with the client, with the corporate legal departments? Because you started working with the in-house legal teams, and you’ve expanded to move into the law firm market. So do you think this is what’s causing that shift?
[00:10:48] Laurent Wiesel: Generally, yes. So I think that the shift that we’re seeing now is understood to have really originated in the aftermath of the financial crisis in the litigation space in particular. Major corporations and banks in particular were just facing never-before-seen demands on legal departments in terms of volume of work, and also never-before-seen scrutiny of legal departments in terms of their budgets and their ability to manage costs in order to ultimately improve the company’s bottom line. I would say that initially the pressure came out of corporate legal departments. Today, however, and this is really related to our decision to expand to law firms, law firms themselves see an opportunity to profit and to have competitive advantage by being able to position themselves to answer these types of questions that other firms aren’t able to answer around predictability and timelines.
[00:11:56] Greg Lambert: So you go through and look at the analytics of the situation. So how does a company like Justly differentiate itself from the other legal analytics tools that are out on the market?
[00:12:06] Laurent Wiesel: So first of all, Justly focuses on the litigation space. So we’re offering various solutions around litigation matters and litigation businesses. Our differentiating value proposition is our data. So Justly, unlike most tools out there, is very much a content company. Our efforts really start with our content, which is primarily state and federal court records, and we differentiate ourselves from tools and other content providers through our coverage. We cover the most courts of any legal analytics company and the granularity of our insights.
[00:12:51] Marlene Gebauer: So Laurent, how would you define analytics in the legal context?
[00:12:56] Laurent Wiesel: That’s a nice question. We think of analytics as insights that enhance client value and business performance, development of insights that yield value for a firm’s clients and improve the firm’s bottom line.
[00:13:12] Marlene Gebauer: Sounds good to me. It certainly probably sounds good to your clients.
[00:13:18] Greg Lambert: When we talk about analytics, we talk about law firms. We talk about law firm clients. One of the things I saw in a tweet this morning from Jeff Carr, who a lot of people remember from FMC Technologies, he says when it comes to this type of innovation, whether it’s analytics, being able to evaluate your situation, there’s a confusion on who the client is. When you have an innovation like this, who’s the client? Is the law firm the client or is the in-house counsel the client? Who’s the one that is going to benefit the most from having this type of analytics and data sets?
[00:13:59] Laurent Wiesel: Interesting. Very interesting question. I would say that in the legal industry, the ultimate beneficiary has to be the client, the client in the legal relationship.
[00:14:14] Greg Lambert: Right. In this instance, the client would literally be the law firm’s client. So the in-house counsel would be the client.
[00:14:21] Laurent Wiesel: Exactly. And the job of the law firm is to deliver value to their clients. And if they do that well and they manage to keep their costs down, then they will be profitable. What Justly does in particular, and where we focus our efforts, is in enhancing the ability of law firms to deliver client value.
[00:14:51] Marlene Gebauer: Hey, AHRQ is once again sponsoring their Excellent Knowledge Management in the Legal Profession Seminar on October 23rd through 24th at New York Law School. There is a fantastic line of speakers and I’m really looking forward to attending. We have a link for you to check out on the lineup and the topics. I hope to see you there.
[00:15:12] Greg Lambert: So is one of those Excellent Knowledge Management in the Legal Professional Seminar speakers you?
[00:15:19] Marlene Gebauer: It’s true. I’m one of them. I’m one of them.
[00:15:22] Greg Lambert: There’s truly a spectacular group then.
[00:15:25] Marlene Gebauer: Oh, thank you. But I hope to see everybody there. It really is always a good program and I always learn a lot. So please come out and join us. So you talk about that you’re offering insights that enhance client value and business performance. And you talked a little bit to Greg’s question about, you know, who is the ultimate client? Do you sometimes have a challenge getting a client or a firm to understand the value of the analytics? I know sometimes it seems to be maybe different, you know, in terms of people’s workflow than what they’re used to. And it’s sort of a challenge to understand sort of where the value is in doing the analytic. Do you have that type of challenge? And if so, what do you do to combat that?
[00:16:26] Laurent Wiesel: In an ideal situation, that challenge does not exist because…
[00:16:31] Marlene Gebauer: We’re not in an ideal world.
[00:16:34] Laurent Wiesel: But conversations should start with a problem, right? So in an ideal world, the client, the law firm will come to us with a specific problem. And that is a problem that hasn’t found a solution in, let’s say, traditional legal research. When that happens, you know, we are able to provide a solution to the problem, then that’s the way it should work. Now, a lot of times conversations start without a specific problem in mind. Firms, you know, may have a very broad array of pains, let’s say, and in order to hone in on the particular problem that finds the solution in analytics can be a process and a difficult process. But as long as you are heading in the direction of discovering what the problems are, then you’re heading in the right direction.
[00:17:36] Greg Lambert: When you talk about analytics, let’s be a little clear here. How do your types of analytics differ, say, from the analytics that we may see in legal research?
[00:17:44] Laurent Wiesel: The way I, you know, generally think of legal research, and you guys are the experts, so, you know, this should go right back to you.
[00:17:53] Greg Lambert: Well, Marlene is the expert. I am terrible.
[00:17:57] Laurent Wiesel: It’s that, you know, at its foundation and in its initial design, you know, online legal research is like an online version of a library. The value proposition of the legal research platform is to make it as easy as possible for users to find the information that they’re looking for. And analytics may come into play to help researchers find answers, but ultimately the research that is the analytics are in order to do better research, not in order to solve the problem that the researcher is tasked with solving.
[00:18:44] Marlene Gebauer: It’s interesting what you’re saying, because I do see that there’s more of an overlap now that, you know, perhaps in the past, you know, research was done and it was provided to, you know, either someone did it or it was provided to someone who then made the analysis themselves. And now we have resources that will essentially enhance the legal research and offer these insights to people to assist them.
[00:19:11] Greg Lambert: How do you leverage the analytics? And so take it away from legal research. And how does a firm use a product like Justly then to help them get to the answer that they need?
[00:19:22] Laurent Wiesel: It starts with the problem. Okay, maybe if we could take a step back from Justly itself to speak more broadly about, you know, how firms leverage legal analytics or litigation analytics and why they might do so. It starts with the problem, right, as we talked about before. And that can be, you know, broadly speaking, a problem that cannot be solved or is too difficult to solve using traditional legal research.
[00:19:48] Greg Lambert: Once we found the problem, where do we move from there?
[00:19:50] Laurent Wiesel: In the context of analytics, once you have a problem, you need two things. So you need data. So you need to be able to access the analytics. The information that you believe can be leveraged to help solve the problem. And then you also need the resources to be able to do so by resources that could be people, People who know how to access this data, tools, tools needed to understand the data. Excel is an example. And of course, money to be able to pay these people and to pay for these tools and to acquire the data and to spend the time needed to develop an analytic solution.
[00:20:31] Marlene Gebauer: Are analytics synonymous to AI or what’s the difference between those two buzzwords?
[00:20:37] Laurent Wiesel: I don’t think that they are synonymous. Since we’ve been talking about research, I would look at this as a continuum from research, which is, you know, as we discussed, the ability to identify the sources of information needed, to analytics, which is the ability to synthesize that information, to AI, which it’s hard to say exactly what AI will bring to the table. It should be more than better or more automated analytic.
[00:21:13] Marlene Gebauer: Well, I was going to say it simplifies the process for the end user. It speeds the results. You know, you point out that, you know, we actually want better results, you know, by using AI.
[00:21:25] Laurent Wiesel: Here’s an example. So let’s take a situation where a law firm is responding to a litigation panel RFP, OK? So a company wants to renew its panel and select the best law firms out there for its panel, and puts that request to law firms who then may use analytics to prepare their responses and position themselves to be added to the panel. AI in this context might be an application on the company’s side that decides, you know, which law firms would be best for the company based on the law firm’s submissions, let’s say. So AI is like making the decisions. Analytics is like supporting better decisions.
[00:22:17] Greg Lambert: You deal a lot with litigation analytics, and you said the three things you need for analytics is a problem and then you need data and resources. What types of problems can you solve with the litigation analytics?
[00:22:29] Laurent Wiesel: There are a number. On the business side, we would classify the problems out there in three broad categories. So there’s experience. Firms are challenged with leveraging their experience in order to win business, better staff cases, attract and identify recruits. There are applications in the marketing context, so market intelligence, a better understanding of your clients’ needs, better process for preparing for pitches and responding to RFPs. There is the competitive intelligence context. So that’s as a law firm, understanding your competition better, who is doing work for prospective clients, how can you expand your business and overtake your competition? That’s one aspect of the business side. Then you also have like the pricing and cost management angle where law firms and clients want to better understand the costs of things. want to better understand the costs of things and better manage their costs. For clients, that’s about spending less. For law firms, that means pricing more competitively and being profitable. And then also in various practices, there are applications of litigation analytics and litigation strategy. Where should we bring a lawsuit? Judges are more favorable, act more favorably in particular types of cases or on particular types of motions. It’s really a broad spectrum of problems that lend themselves to analytic solutions within law firms, which is what makes law firms for us a very attractive and interesting customer segment.
[00:24:19] Marlene Gebauer: Well, I want to say thank you for the examples. I think it’s really important to lay that out. And I hope our law firm listeners are hearing these examples because I think maybe they could benefit from this. Tell us a little bit more about the experience side in terms of analytics used. Can we dig a little deeper on that in terms of examples?
[00:24:40] Laurent Wiesel: Absolutely. So for a law firm, for a partnership, the partnership’s greatest asset is the experience of its members. And in order for law firms as business to get the most out of their people, a law firm needs to be able to record that experience and manage it in a way where it can be accessed by the business and by other members in order to then have like a kind of network effect within the firm around the experience of individual lawyers. So law firms are challenged with that. Many law firms have done poor job historically tracking experience, and it’s hard. And law firms, as they grow in size and face more faster turnover, more higher velocity of laterals coming in and moving out, there are additional challenges there too. For a law firm to be able to kind of solve this experience problem, you need to have a significant amount of resources in order to gather the data necessary and then to be able to extract insights from that data. And it’s almost like you need an additional type of skill set that perhaps hasn’t always been found in the law firm in order to really do this type of work. Exactly. That’s where software comes into play. Where software comes in is where we can add a capability or an ability to the law firm’s existing tools and resources in a cost-effective way. You might have, you know, a couple of people who have data analytics skills in-house.
[00:26:30] Marlene Gebauer: If you’re lucky, if you’re lucky.
[00:26:32] Laurent Wiesel: Yeah, if you’re lucky. If you’re lucky. Even if those couple of people have skills, are they enough to manage the caseload of a humongous firm, to manage the marketing demands for a large firm? Probably not. Software can enhance the capabilities of existing assets within the firm and can add a level of capability that existing assets may not satisfy.
[00:27:00] Greg Lambert: I have to say that you said earlier that maintaining experience or understanding the experience of a law firm is hard. I think that’s an understatement. It is. It’s very hard. As the person who has to do it for my firm, it’s very hard.
[00:27:16] Laurent Wiesel: As I believe you know, there are not only Justly, but others working in the space who are making it more easy for law firms to track their experience and that need that you just described is pretty well understood at this point. And the good news is that Justly and others are working to solve it and it’s probably never been easier than it is now.
[00:27:38] Greg Lambert: So where do you think we are in the application of litigation analytics? And I know that right now we’re helping with experience, but project out a little bit. Where do you see the future of litigation analytics going?
[00:27:51] Laurent Wiesel: Pretty far, as far as the imagination can see. I think that, you know, starting with experience and marketing, we’re just only seeing the beginning. You know, there’s like a saying that the only innovation of the internet is like in the marketing and advertising space. Similarly, in legal, it’s no surprise that the initial applications are in kind of the business development and marketing space. It’s going to go in many directions. At Justly, what we’re looking at is pricing, the application of analytics to allow law firms to standardize the way they price their services and to, you know, ultimately create pricing standardization in the market. But I think that we will, you know, over time see applications of analytics in practice, law firms like persuading judges more and more using insights generated from data. Beyond that, I think we’ll start to see analytics and, you know, forms of AI in the judiciary to streamline decision-making processes for judges and administrative organizations and all the way to robo-lawyers and robo-judges. But in a really long time, a long way to go.
[00:29:12] Marlene Gebauer: OK, this all sounds great. You got me sold except for one thing. OK, one thing. Good content is a major component of analytics. You know, I think that the saying is that there’s lies, damn lies and statistics. It’s got to be good content in order to rely on it. And there’s been a lot of question about the metrics used, you know, particularly in some of the litigation analytics solutions, you know, whether it’s, you know, nature of suit codes related or whether it’s, you know, some of the holes that are in dockets. What’s the challenge there for you? What do you say to those folks that say that, you know, we need to have some more transparency around this so we understand what we’re getting?
[00:29:56] Laurent Wiesel: Like speaking from the perspective of a vendor or a software developer, you know, our challenges are really your challenges. So you have to look at the end user. So the end user has to deliver something, has to deliver an insight, has to deliver information. You have to put information into the end user’s hands that they’re comfortable with and they trust. It’s really from our perspective about trying different things and developing insights, giving transparency into the underlying data in order for the end user to trust the insights and to ultimately rely on those insights.
[00:30:40] Marlene Gebauer: I like that, you know, it’s like we’re all kind of in this together.
[00:30:44] Laurent Wiesel: Yeah.
[00:30:44] Marlene Gebauer: You guys are struggling with it. We’re struggling with it. It’s really kind of a new area and we’re all trying to get to the right.
[00:30:50] Laurent Wiesel: Exactly. And it goes back to the question that you asked at the beginning. The beneficiary of everything that we’re talking about, including the robo judge, is the client who is accessing the legal system.
[00:31:03] Greg Lambert: Let me ask a bonus question here, Laurent. What would be one of the best ways that whether it is the client, the law firm, the courts, or the vendors could clean up or make available the data that’s out there so that we can make better decisions? Where’s the sticking point right now when it comes to the way the data is accessible?
[00:31:30] Laurent Wiesel: Trying to remain as general as possible. I would say that the greatest challenge is in the number of data sources that need to be brought together to answer more complex questions or to develop analytics. It’s never enough to just be able to access one court’s data on their website, for example. You then need to take that data and you need to combine it with something else, information about lawyers or judges or firms’ internal experience. It’s the gathering in and the aggregating of all these various data sources and connecting them that is the biggest challenge. The ability to make those connections is where the value lies. A law firm’s ability to make connections between data sources that other firms are not able to make creates a new area for law firms to differentiate themselves from others.
[00:32:40] Greg Lambert: All right, so Laurent, feeding into that, there needs to definitely be some standards that the courts have, that the law firms have, that the vendors have, so that these different systems are speaking, at least can translate the language into a common core type of language. So there’s a group out there called SALI, which is the Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry, which I know you’re part of, I know Marlene’s part of. How does a standards organization like that help us communicate better between those different systems?
[00:33:13] Laurent Wiesel: Yeah, so SALI is doing very impressive work, as you said, in the area of developing standard taxonomies, a common language for describing legal work. A great thing that they do is they bring together stakeholders from different stakeholders in the industry. So you have representatives from in-house, from law firms, from courts, insurance companies, all working together in order to develop a common language, common way of describing things that work for the industry as currently constituted. And these types of efforts are very important and bode well for the advancement of our industry.
[00:34:01] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, and I know they’re very welcome by the industry. I know CLOCK is a big supporter of these things. And I mean, just circling back to the beneficiary of analytics is the client. I mean, how nice would it be for clients to be able to really see a common analytic in terms of experience of law firms and be able to make choices that way? Seems so simple, right?
[00:34:23] Laurent Wiesel: It’s like the disinfecting quality of sunlight, the greater transparency is going to allow everybody to make better decisions and is going to elevate the industry for everyone.
[00:34:37] Marlene Gebauer: Well, thank you so much, Laurent. It’s been great speaking with you. I’ve learned a lot. I hope our listeners have learned a lot as well. Thanks so much.
[00:34:46] Laurent Wiesel: Thank you, guys.
[00:34:47] Greg Lambert: Bye, Laurent. Thanks again.
[00:34:48] Laurent Wiesel: Okay, take care. Bye-bye.
[00:34:53] Greg Lambert: So, Marlene, do you see what I mean when I said Laurent needed to explain it to me like I’m a second grader?
[00:34:59] Marlene Gebauer: Exactly. Exactly.
[00:35:01] Greg Lambert: Oh, man, that was good stuff. So, you know, we’ve been using Justly at my firm for a while now, and especially on our experience database at the firm, which I’m in charge of. And that’s why I said, man, experience databases are hard. So we’ve been looking at a number of ways of integrating the data that Laurent’s team grabs for us into things like matter management, pricing, staffing, and just overall reporting of our experience. So the fact that there’s a lot of state information, state court information in the data is a big deal for us.
[00:35:37] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, that’s always hard to get.
[00:35:39] Greg Lambert: But I will tell you the biggest plus is that we were able to pool information now that we were once asking the attorneys to enter manually. So you can probably imagine how well manually entering in data by attorneys went over.
[00:35:54] Marlene Gebauer: Not well at all.
[00:35:55] Greg Lambert: Yeah, so this helps a lot with that.
[00:35:56] Marlene Gebauer: When I was listening to Laurent and I’m listening to you, I see that there’s a lot of development that can be had with some of these metrics and analytics. The thing I think about, though, is how do we get the users of this information to essentially accept it as part of their workflow? The users here are people who have a wealth of experience. They have a lot of judgment. They understand this space and the players. And they have a lot to offer here. And they believe that they know this space and that they can make these decisions. And bringing in the evidence-based materials might be perceived as a challenge. But how I’m seeing it is that you can use both and should use both. And just kind of compare to see what the metrics are telling you versus what your judgment is telling you. Is it verifying or not? And if it’s not, then it’s worth looking into. And it’s just really something. It’s really just an additional set of information that gives you the ability to make better decisions.
[00:37:01] Greg Lambert: Yeah, and it kind of reminds me of the old anecdote from when GPS first started out. I don’t know if you remember hearing, but apparently there was this couple that sued the GPS company because they were following the directions. And they went right off the end of a bridge that didn’t exist, even though the GPS… I remember that. The thing is, this is kind of like that. GPS is not meant to be the only thing you follow. The GPS is supposed to advance your ability to be better drivers. And I think the same thing with the analytics and with the data. This is to make you be able to use the experience that you have in a much better way, but it cannot be the only thing you rely on. You have to have other factors that you’re using, otherwise you will be driving off that bridge that doesn’t exist.
[00:37:53] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, that’s not a good outcome.
[00:37:56] Greg Lambert: Driving off a bridge is never a good outcome. All right, Marlene, I think that wraps up episode 13. I want to thank all of you, our listeners out there of The Geek & Review. Don’t forget to click the subscribe button on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcast, as well as rate and review The Geek & Review so that others can find us. You can tweet us @GayBauerM or Glambert if you have comments or suggestions.
[00:38:23] Marlene Gebauer: Thanks again to Laurent Wiesel, founder and CEO of Justly, for joining us, and thanks to Kevin MacLeod for his original music.
[00:38:29] Greg Lambert: All right. See you later, Marlene.
[00:38:32] Marlene Gebauer: All right. Bye-bye, Greg.