A couple months ago, we brought in Bob Taylor and Jeff Marple from Liberty Mutual, and Gabe Teninbaum from Suffolk Law School to discuss the Boston Legal Design Challenge being held online in November. Taylor and Marple are back to discuss how things went, and they brought with them one of the members of the championship team, Aubrie Souza. Souza is a 2L from Suffolk and her team triumphed over the other nine law school competitors from across the United States and Canada. While the event was held online, the technology, the structure, and the facilitators and judges made all of the competitors feel as though they were still working side by side.

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Information Inspirations

Lillian Michelson created a magnificent library for movie design. Over a fifty-year span, Michelson helped movie producers and directors make scenes realistic through her research and cataloging of information and details. Unfortunately, she no longer had the space to store all of her research and materials. For the past few years, the library sat in boxes looking for a home, or to be digitized. Finally, the Internet Archive and its founder, Brewster Kahle heeded the call and are placing the material on the Internet Archives database for all. A ribbon-cutting event is taking place on January 27, 2021 launching the first phase of this project.

The Baltimore Library is raising $25,000.00 for a van to provide legal resources to the surrounding community. This project is exactly how Access to Justice issues need to be addressed. The project is headed up by Baltimore County Librarian Julie Brophy, and Maryland Legal Aid Pro-Bono Director Amy Petkovsek. Hat’s off to both for taking this on.

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Transcript

Greg Lambert:  Welcome to the Geek in Review. Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 98 – The Boston Legal Design Challenge Update

Many of the Luminaries agreed that we are likely to see a big increase in demand for LPM services.

Legal Value Network Council of Luminaries Meeting Report: COVID-19 Crisis Series

As director of (what is to the best of my knowledge) the largest legal project management team of any law firm, I was not the source for the above. But it was music to my ears and consistent with my lived experience. My team has observed a spike in demand for LPM services.

There are, however, limits in the legal ecosystem’s overall ability to immediately satisfy this demand for better project management. The near-term constraint creates longer-term doubts about the sustainability of the uptick in demand in many organizations where there is no current LPM capacity to meet the urgent need. Sustained commitment is required, and worthwhile.

While I reflect here on LPM, I submit that what is true of LPM is equally true for many other items on the legal innovator wish list. Opportunities abound but an inflection point does not automatically translate into changes that best serve the collective interest. We face hard choices—followed, unavoidably, by hard work.

WFH was feasible and imperative

In considering the surge of interest in LPM (or anything else that addresses some of the fallout from the challenges we all face) it is worth examining why legal service delivery was able to pivot to work from home given that the speed of the transition to WFH is now being cited as evidence of how quickly legal services can adapt.

Consider two critical elements of the velocity with which WFH became standard operating procedure: (1) we had no choice and (2) the infrastructure was already in place.

The lack of choice is conspicuous. WFH is necessary. The alternative was ceasing to serve clients in a moment of crisis. Yet while I submit our current challenges, including the need to maintain the cohesion and coherence of completely remote teams, has made the compelling case for LPM all the more salient, I would stop well short of labeling LPM as “necessary.”

The infrastructure component is less prominent. Imagine if C19 hit in 2008 (as part of the Great Recession). An immediate transition to a completely remote legal workforce would have been unthinkable and an unmitigated disaster. The mix of hardware, software, broadband access, information architecture, and ways of working simply were not available at the scale necessary. Fortunately, we have the general WFH infrastructure in place now. In this narrow respect, we were mostly prepared for the pandemic. Unfortunately, we lack a general LPM infrastructure—for now, we only have discrete pockets of LPM excellence, unevenly distributed.

Thus, while this crisis should accelerate the integration of LPM into the multi-disciplinary delivery of legal services, this ascension is not assured. “We’ve always done it this way” remains viable, if sub-optimal, in many respects. Conversely, organizations that have not previously made serious investments in building their LPM capacity may be hard pressed to do so amidst a liquidity crunch and severe economic downturn.

The concise case for LPM

To leave no doubt, I welcome the increase in demand for LPM. I want to contribute to a period of industry-wide punctuational change, including the broader deployment of LPM. It can absolutely be done but requires sustained commitment. We need to “build.”  LPM is not a quick fix.

Quick or not, I submit the argument in favor of LPM remains fairly unassailable.

All projects are managed, the only question is whether they are managed well. LPM applies the disciplines of project management to legal service delivery. LPM makes legal work trackable, tractable, and transparent for lawyers and clients. Quality outcomes, on time and on budget, are the purpose of professionalizing project management of legal matters and portfolios. The larger and more complex, the greater the impact of LPM.

LPM is not “the answer” to every question because there is no singular answer. But a well-integrated LPM function can serve as connective tissue—instrumental in helping lawyers take advantage of, and optimize, the variety of tools at their disposal. A legal project manager involved in matter planning can assist lawyers in marshaling the full array of available resources, from technology to knowledge assets to cost-advantaged service centers, to meet client needs.

While a strong case, the foregoing is not simple, not obvious, and not easy.

LPM is not obvious

Superficially, the easiest sales pitch for LPM is: the legal project manager will take on many of the more mundane management tasks currently being handled by lawyers. And do so at lower costs.

Saving money while unburdening lawyers from labor-intensive tasks tends to land well—at first. But then many lawyers will, correctly, start to wonder about the additional costs, like communications overhead, associated with an additional team member. A new “non-lawyer”, in particular, raises questions about the divisibility of work (different than the division of labor). Is it really worthwhile to add a new person take on tasks lawyers were handling?

Yes. Yes, it is worthwhile. But not obviously so. The labor arbitrage is real. It should, however, ultimately be a minor consideration. Working differently and better is how LPM makes a major impact. But different is, well, different. Different is, almost by definition, non-obvious. And definitions do not close the obviousness gap:

Legal project management is a process of defining the parameters of a matter upfront, planning the course of the matter at the outset with the facts you have at the time, managing the matter, and, at the end, evaluating how the matter was handled (from both the firm or law department perspective and the client perspective). (here)

We define legal project management as a proactive, disciplined approach to managing legal work that involves defining, planning, budgeting, executing, and evaluating a legal matter. Simply put, it is a step by step approach to help lawyers clarify the scope and potential cost of services they are providing for a client, proactively managing the services consistent with the client’s expectations, and using each engagement as an opportunity for learning and improvement. (here)

Sounds great, in the abstract. But vague. What does this actually mean? How does it work? Like my “strong case” above, the standard definitions of LPM are not automatically accessible to the uninitiated. You only understand once you understand; everything is obvious once you know the answer. As is so often true across the ever-evolving legal service delivery landscape, this is ignorance in the least pejorative sense of the word—individuals lacking knowledge they should not be expected to possess.

The deficit of automatic understanding of what LPM can offer is only exacerbated by the divergent ways LPM is deployed. Even in organizations where LPM is well established, legal project managers can serve rather different purposes.

When I was consulting law departments on their legal buy, I put the following questions in RFIs:

• How many legal project managers does the firm employ?
• What specifically will the firm’s legal project managers do to add value to [client]?
• What are the conditions under which LPM will be deployed to benefit [client]?

It is well established I consider such questions essential and have found considerable entertainment in many answers, good and bad, I graded over the years (though, candidly, I was a victim of my own bombast and reluctant to write about my new role until I was confident we could answer these questions better than our peer firms).

In surveying the landscape of LPM in law firms—LPM in law departments and ALSPs is more opaque; LPM at the Big 4 is a different story entirely and demands another post about segments of the market where LPM leaps from competitive advantage to competitive necessity—you find, first and foremost, most law firms employ relatively few legal project managers. Not that many law firms with over 500 lawyers even break double digits with respect to their ranks of legal project managers.

Next, you find the LPM remit varies greatly. At some firms, legal project managers are focused on process improvement. At some firms, they are more akin to account managers, supporting billing and reporting to augment specific client relationships. At only a small minority of firms are legal project managers regularly deployed to help actively manage the firm’s largest, most complex matters. There is nothing wrong with any of these (my team does all three—though we prefer to setup the client-specific processes for billing/reporting and then hand those off). But the diversity speaks to the intelligibility, or lack thereof, when busy lawyers first encounter the suggestion they incorporate LPM into meeting client needs.

LPM is not simple

For the initiated, the end state of LPM is appealing.

The lawyers get to lawyer. They manage by exception—i.e., address critical issues early while avoiding racing down rabbit holes to gain clarity on the status of the many items that are going to plan. They conduct constructive, data-informed conversations with clients because the necessary status and budgetary information is immediately available and well-organized into visually enhanced reports useful for decision making. The lawyers deliver quality results, on time and on budget, by ensuring the right mix of tech-enabled resources are working cohesively and coherently.

The legal project manager facilitates this by bringing the appropriate tools and templates to bear. They serve as a central organizing force, not only engineering but also refining and maintaining a workflow that results in a reliable single source of truth. The attendant ability to report on status, finances, risks, and issues, including dependencies and downstream impacts, lends itself to simplified dashboards that highlight where lawyer/client attention is required, and where it is not. This is a product of skill and savvy. It is also the product of intense, focused labor—the immense effort required to collect and collate disparate data while ensuring it is current, clean, and concise.

The LPM end state is appealing. The beginning, less so.

Where do you find that first legal project manager? This is not a rhetorical question. We have hired a couple dozen legal project managers around the world in the last year and need to fill a similar number of new openings in the years ahead. Locating quality candidates is a challenge. As mentioned, there are few legal project management teams and most of the ones that do exist are small. If anyone has recommendations for me, please share. Because we have the infrastructure, we are exploring how to ‘make’ legal project managers—legal project manager being both a role and a set of skills / disciplines that must be learned, applied, and refined.

Next comes the first project. The new legal project manager is unlikely to have available the fit-to-purpose tools or templates that underpin a well-structured matter. These are born out of experience. Iteration. Operationalizing lessons learned. Finding what needs to be fixed and fixing it in ways well calibrated to the lawyers and matter types being supported. The new legal project manager can add value immediately. But their contribution will be circumscribed. Repeatability is central to the LPM value proposition—but there is nothing being repeated on the maiden project.

Then comes the paired challenges of growth and teaming. Having one legal project manager in one location working in one practice area is not an LPM function—which consists of individual legal project managers but also, in aggregate, assumes responsibility for more systemically instilling project management discipline and process excellence, including for the large majority of matters that will never have a designated legal project manager. The individual journey must be reproduced with different lawyers working in different areas of law. Then, at a certain point, to reach its potential as a contributing team, LPM has to establish and enforce consistency across the organization. This is far harder than it sounds. It requires legal project managers, who are cast in a supporting role, to be proactive in shaping the way legal services are delivered at scale. The legal project managers not only need to supply their lawyers with good tools and processes, they have to shepherd lawyers into standardized tools and processes, which are then fine-tuned to specific needs [I’m getting nodding agreement from peers in legal operations, technology, pricing, knowledge, et al. who appreciate the vigilance and fortitude required to maintain consistency in large organizations populated by smart, successful, autonomous, action-oriented professionals].

This maturation occurs against the backdrop of the siren song of gap filling. To the extent legal project managers prove themselves adept at unburdening lawyers, there is a natural tendency to look to LPM to solve whatever problems arise. A continuous dialogue about continuous improvement should be encouraged. But, unless some level of rigor is maintained, mission creep can undermine LPM being put to its highest and best use. This is a delicate balance—pushing a burden back on the lawyers tends to be the worst possible outcome—that speaks to the need for parallel investments in complementary aspects of the legal service delivery infrastructure (those other resources LPM is meant to help marshal). There are many questions to which LPM is not itself the answer.

Creation and subsequent progression of an LPM function is worthwhile. It is also entirely achievable. But it can only go so far, so fast. The commitment required extends beyond the momentum of this crucial moment.

LPM is not easy

On-boarding new people is time and labor intensive. Legal project managers more so. Legal project managers do not merely need to be acclimated to “what we do here,” they are required to ask why things are done the way they are. In the beginning, these will not all be good questions or always lead to useful conclusions. Yet even where the legal project manager identifies a better way, better is still different. Different comes at a cost. The implementation dip is inevitable. There is no LPM pixie dust.

Ramp-up requires investment. Iteration never ends. But no matter the maturity and stability, hard work remains.

Take, for example, the insights from Alexandra Guajardo, Pricing & Analytics Officer at Shell, on a Legal Value Network webinar that preceded the Council of Luminaries report I quote at the beginning of this post (also, pay attention to LVN). In commenting on the impact of the current crisis, Alex zeroed in on the importance of law firm “LPM reports”—which she defines as matter status and financial updates broken down by phase, workstream, jurisdiction, etc.—to facilitate data-informed dialogue between inside and outside counsel.

In addition to applause for Alex, I offer an observation: these types of reports are hard work, especially on the large, complex matters where they are the most useful.

For this detailed report to be provided quickly and accurately, it must be anticipated. At the beginning of the matter when everyone is keen to get moving to meet some important business objective, the stakeholders need to pause, sit down, and have a conversation about what kind of reporting will best serve the project/client needs. These decisions will demand trade-offs and ultimately drive the matter’s data strategy.

The data strategy then requires ongoing data discipline. In particular, in the example Alex offers, the time recording protocol will need to be setup in a way that will enable closed time to be mapped to the appropriate phases, workstreams, etc. Then all the timekeepers will need to be diligent in closing their time in accordance with the protocol. This is doable but not easy. [More nodding from everyone who has ever been required to regularly close time with numerous mandatory fields (e.g., task and activity codes). Even more vigorous nodding from anyone who has been responsible for getting a large number of timekeepers do so consistently.]

Doable but not easy. Not easy, in part, because there are strict limits to what LPM can offer on its own. The reporting example—with its reliance on leadership buy-in and stakeholder compliance—illuminates how LPM is not an independent variable that delivers independent value. LPM must be integrated and integrative. My friend John Grant once phrased it so well, “LPM is something we do with you, it is not something we can do for you.” John shared that wisdom with me after he penned a marvelous essay about a failed attempt at establishing real LPM at a large law firm—my RFI questions above played a starring, if unfortunate, role in that situation coming to a head.

LPM is about not just coordination but collaboration. Collaboration has a cost. The cost is well worth it. The return on investment in good LPM is substantial. But the return is hard earned—over time. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Wrapping Up

I’ve meditated on LPM. I agree with the Luminaries that now could, and should, be a moment for LPM to shine. While the crisis warrants our attention and our effort, it is worth projecting how our re-actions today will shape our tomorrow—a concern that extends well beyond LPM.

My desire is for near-term needs to translate into long-term investments that serve the sector and our clients well, in good times as well as bad. Yet I know from plodding through the Great Recession and its aftermath that strategic innovation is far from a natural consequence of hard times. The Great Recession changed a great many things but not always in ways or to the degree so many hoped.

Hope—that I still have. My career is premised on the genuine belief that, over time, constructive dialogue and deep relationships can drive systemic improvements that serve our collective best interest. We can, and should, pursue better together. But I am not a naif. I do not believe in magic. I do not expect spontaneous, organic, and immaculate transformations that are quick, clean, and free. I recognize the limits of incremental improvements. I know obvious ≠ simple ≠ easy. But I also know complicated ≠ hard ≠ impossible. This is complicated. This is hard. But it is not impossible.

I began with an observation that WFH took so quickly because it was imperative and the infrastructure was already in place. I noted we would not have been able to meet a similar mandate back in the Great Recession. While I know, generally, we are not where we would like to be with respect to evolving the way legal services are delivered—the mandate of the moment is murky and the infrastructure to meet it uneven—we are closer than we’ve ever been. The last decade-plus has not been wasted. We’ve been laying the groundwork for today. The readiness is all.

 

At the recent, excellent Law 2030, Vijay Govindarajan observed, “There is only so much Six Sigma you can do.” Despite my affinities, I concur. Low baselines can have an outsized impact on the efficacy of interventions—but then baselines stop being low.

Consider buying a car with an eye towards better gas mileage.

Which technological leap saves more gas? Improving a car’s miles per gallon (i) from 10 mpg to 20 mpg or (ii) from 20 mpg to 100 mpg?

Put another way, from the perspective of gallons saved, what is the ‘bigger improvement’ (i) +10 mpg/2x or (ii) +80 mpg/5x?

Since I’m asking the question, you already surmised the answer is counter intuitive:

One simple takeaway is that once you cut something in half, there is nothing you can do, save eliminating it entirely, that will ever again deliver the same raw level of improvement.

In the legal context, for example, we have good reason to accelerate contract review. Start with a standard review that averages 20 minutes and reduce it by 60% through basic interventions (harmonized templates, checklists, playbooks, deviation matrices, etc.). You save 12 minutes per contract. Next, throw on some razzle dazzle AI that reduces average review time by another 60%. You save less than 5 additional minutes. That’s not nothing, especially with large volumes. But it comes at a cost, including the opportunity cost of addressing other chokepoints, constraints, and rate-limiting factors. Continue Reading The Limits of Incremental Improvements

January was a busy month on my LinkedIn. Birthday and a work anniversary. The automatic notifications prompted some splendid exchanges with old friends. And I received a few questions worth answering more publicly.

Where you been?

Working. Took the new job at the beginning of 2019. It was exciting at the time. Even more exciting now. But I wanted to do something before I said something. When you spill ink decrying the lack of substance underpinning many discussions of innovation in legal service delivery, you set yourself up to be indicted on charges of hypocrisy (a misdemeanor). I’ve mostly kept my head down and gone about the business of demonstrable progress (to be continued).

When will you write/speak again?

Now.

What about?

So much to say. But I’ll start with a shibboleth that continues to burrow deeper into my brain despite the fact I’ve been repeating it for years.

Obvious ≠ Simple ≠ Easy

Everything is obvious—once you know the answer (great book, btw). But what is obvious is not always simple. And what is simple is not necessarily easy. Since it’s resolution season, I’ll use the ubiquitous ‘diet and exercise’ as my real-world example with guest appearances by old acquaintances like innovation, AFAs, and artificial intelligence to bring it home to our space.

It’s obvious but not that obvious. While a huge swath of the population acknowledges they should eat healthier and exercise more regularly, most of the thinking beyond that gets hazy despite no shortage of generally recognized motivations. Look better. Feel better. Live longer. These are admirable but amorphous goals that remain mostly aspirational save some short, intermittent efforts to ‘do something’. Relative to the popularity of the topics, the actual incidence of sustained, effective commitment to improved diet and exercise are vanishingly small (far different from nonexistent—in raw numbers, there are many success stories). People have other present, pressing priorities.

Innovation in legal services is similarly admirable and amorphous. It is an aspirational abstraction to which few raise objection. We witness innumerable, repeat vows to innovate (and countless examples of real innovation). But relative to the supposed attention to innovation, the felt impact consistently disappoints. Legal professionals have other present, pressing priorities.

Other present, pressing priorities should not be dismissed. Family, emotional health, work, etc. are legitimate consumers of personal energy and attention. Actually delivering legal services to the people and businesses who need them today rightfully has pride of place among legal professionals. The fundamental attribution error and blame-based narratives are unhelpful in telling the story of clinging to current behavioral patterns.

But it’s not merely being busy. It is also the fact that when you decide to pursue change, the question of how to change gets complicated, in short order.

It’s not so simple. At a high level, ‘eat healthy’ is quite simple—and beyond vague. Imagine tackling the question for the first time and finding, as has been observed by others, that for every diet there is an equal and opposite diet.

Exercise selection is equally taxing (running, lifting, yoga, etc.). Consider the variations (sprinting, 5Ks, marathons; cross fit, powerlifting, Olympic lifting; Ashtanga, Anusara, Bikram) and infinite, often conflicting, advice on training protocols from people locked in internecine squabbles incomprehensible to outsiders. So many people purport to have the answer. Yet the number of answers to sift through is practically infinite.

Then there is the inconvenient facts that weight loss is not the same as fat loss and being lean is not the same as being healthy. People not surviving marathons. The extreme misery of fitness competitors. Yogis hurting themselves. If you are the type of person who wants to do things well, let alone perfectly, you will quickly suffer from information overload. A swift return to the couch is not without its appeal.

Again, plenty of people have successfully improved, and are improving, various aspects of their lives through better diet and exercise habits with a focus on progress rather perfection. The point here is that when the simple notion that ‘something’ should be done gives way to actually deciding what that something is, complexity often intrudes. Complexity can be discouraging for the well-intentioned novice with other pressing, present priorities.

Worse, the conflation of obvious and simple, tends to drive people towards magic bullet (or magic pill) thinking.

Alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) are an example of a pricing innovation from our space. It is obvious enough to lament the drawbacks of the billable hour—or even declare it dead. But when accurate analysis of the shortcomings of hourly billing gives way to devising a suitable alternative, complexity rears its heads.

There are many different fee arrangements, each with their own mix of tradeoffs. The competing options lend themselves not only to different types of matters but to different preference profiles. The lawyer who wanted a simple alternative to the billable hour instead discovers a decided lack of simplicity. Nor is the associated effort without downside risk—poorly calibrated fee arrangements can go very wrong. It is no wonder that so many revert to the default. Hourly billing is immediately familiar and accessible to anyone under pressure to get moving on the matter itself.

Selecting the right AFA entails hard thinking, hard choices, and, often, hard conversations. Not impossible. These occur every day. Successful AFAs are common enough. But there are comprehensible reasons their penetration comes nowhere close to the revolution that has been consistently predicted for the last four decades.

Moreover, even the successful implementation of AFAs is not a panacea so often imagined. Change the incentives, change the world. The interplay of incentives governing legal service delivery is far more intricate than simply switching fee structures. Many complementary conversations and attendant behavioral changes remain necessary. There are no magic bullets.

It’s not that easy. Determining an optimal diet and exercise plan may not be simple, but there are still many small, simple choices that have a positive impact on health outcomes. For example, in almost every instance: don’t eat the donut.

If you are trying to eat healthier, it is obvious you shouldn’t eat the donut. It is also quite simple. Just don’t eat the donut. But it isn’t easy. Donuts are delicious.

It isn’t easy Monday morning when the donut is fresh. It’s even less so Monday afternoon when a crazy day and a lunch salad have left you peckish. It isn’t easy on Tuesday when, instead of the donut, cookies presents themselves. Or Wednesday introduces a co-worker’s birthday cake. Or Thursday brings your colleagues’ invitation to happy hour. Or Friday screams out for comfort food after a long week. Or Saturday…

Adherence is often a far greater obstacle than diet selection. Our environment of caloric abundance conspires against our best intentions. Through millennia of scarcity, we evolved to eat what is in front of us. Now, delicious, calorie-dense food is constantly in front of us—most of it expertly engineered to light up our dopamine receptors like a Vegas slot machine.

Our work environment is similarly calibrated. We are trained to do the work in front of us. And there is always work in front of us.

Take the perspective of a busy legal professional and start to stack all the seemingly simple tasks we pile on top of one another. Capture your time. Upload documents to X repository using Y naming convention. File your matter-specific emails here. Contribute to this KM initiative. Attend, and pay rapt attention in, these trainings. Read and process these organizational updates. Keep up with trends in your practice area(s). Serve on this committee….oh, and, constantly innovate while simultaneously adopting and adapting to the innovations introduced by others!

In isolation, all simple and doable. In aggregate, overwhelming while also being subordinate to the work itself.

Which is not to say we can never expect people to modify their behavior or build new habits. Rather it is to observe that sustainable change is far less straightforward than merely recognizing benefits will follow therefrom. Sustainable change at the organizational level is an order of magnitude more challenging. Sustainable behavioral change often requires a new mindset grounded in a shift in identity. It requires new skillsets in navigating complex environments and coping with constant change. It requires new systems that eliminate waste masquerading as necessity. It requires tradeoffs, prioritization, and discipline. It is feasible. It is achievable. But not obvious. Not simple. Not easy. There are no magic bullets.

An exercise in empathy. Would-be change agents can quickly become frustrated and fall back into self-righteousness. There is a natural tendency to focus on how right we are—and, correspondingly, how wrong everyone else is for not listening to us. But anyone familiar with my writing knows I am keen to reflect on how wrong I’ve been. In particular, I try to interrogate the gaps in my mental models that lead to inaccurate predictions about the pace, scale, scope, and shape of change in the legal market.

Self-reflection engendered my affinity for Obvious ≠ Simple ≠ Easy. My  operating assumption is that anything obvious, simple, and easy is already in effect. Thus, if I look at a particular problem and think to myself the solution is all of those (happens frequently on a gut level), I am the one in error (so critical to not believe everything you think). I then use the lens of O≠S≠E to work through the problem and identify the errors in my thinking—not to dismiss my initial thought, but to refine it in order to make it workable.

A supposed antidote to natural stupidity. I’ll conclude with artificial intelligence as a final example.

At a certain level of abstraction, the proposition that AI should be applied to the delivery of legal services is obvious enough. AI automates knowledge work. Law is knowledge work. Therefore AI should have an impact on law.

Fair enough. But also fairly facile. To identify actual actionable overlaps, you need to know a decent amount about both law and AI. Most people focused on the day-to-day delivery of legal services do not possess such knowledge—nor should we expect them to. Thus, anyone who has observed (as I surely did once or twice in my wayward youth) that the application of AI to legal work is obvious is making a uselessly broad statement, has no idea what they are talking about, or is omitting a key qualifier: “obvious to people like me.”

Moreover, the constant refrain that the introduction of AI to legal service delivery is obvious has the effect of making it seem simple to the uninitiated. You just buy some AI, turn it on, and reap the rewards of the resulting magic. But anyone who has actually been involved procuring an AI solution can attest to the rigor required to identify a tool fit to purpose given the diversity and variety of options (see here). Simple it is not.

But even if you identify the right tool, it won’t be easy. You need clean data. You need to test and train. You need workflows and quality controls. You need to design, build, and iterate a well-structured process that maximizes the upside and minimizes the risks of the particular tool selected and ensure it is calibrated to context of the specific job to be done. Ultimately, you want to make this feel effortless and intuitive to various stakeholders. But the effort required to make work seem effortless can be extraordinary. It is not easy.

It’s been done. It’s been done well. Repeatedly. We have decades of successes. We have many more successes in front of us. But those successes have been, and will be, hard earned. What can be said of AI, can also be said of AFAs, knowledge management, workflow automation, contract lifecycle management, and all the other ‘basics’ of modern law practice. Even project management—which I may need to address soonish given how much territory in my brain that topic now occupies.

The hard thing about hard things. We do hard things well all the time. We, however, have a natural inclination to then present them as more accessible than they are. Wanting innovation to spread is an act of generosity. Indeed, many innovations exist because some well-meaning soul was initially convinced it was obvious, simple, and easy, then learned it was none of those but persisted anyway.

My aim is not to discourage all happy talk. I do, however, think we need to become better storytellers. We are drawn to tell innovation stories along the lines of this is great, quick, and easy as a way to make the journey attractive to potential fellow travelers. The countervailing impulse to share our struggles, however, tends too far towards this is inhumanely difficult (and therefore praiseworthy) to a degree that runs counter to our collective interest in promoting better behaviors. The sweet spot of this is hard but doable and worthwhile does not always land but is effective when it does.

We (well, me) need to get better at constructive realism not only in the stories we tell but in how we react to the stories others tell themselves. I have been guilty of offering unqualified encouragement to someone who wrongly thought the path before them was obvious, simple, easy. I liked their destination and did not want to be a buzzkill. I have likewise been guilty of accurately pointing out the flaws in lovely plans for the same reason—I wanted to help them avoid pitfalls. But I’ve introduced real talk in a way that dampened the innovation impulse rather than redirected it.

Not all failures are failures of imagination. Not all failures are failures of willpower. We fail for many reasons. Fit. Timing. Design. Planning. Execution. Change management….We succeed for the same reasons. That’s the hard thing about hard things. There are few easy answers. Nor many obvious or simple ones. But there are answers. Obvious ≠ Simple ≠ Easy. Yet:

Complicated ≠ Hard ≠ Impossible

 

The United States military is the most formidable fighting force in the history of warfare, and the rightful birthplace of SNAFU, FUBAR, BOHICA, etc. Jordan’s Bulls were teams for the ages, and a hostile work environment. Breaking Bad is a crowning artistic achievement, and a show whose writers regularly painted themselves into ridiculous narrative corners. Every institution, no matter how venerable, looks like a goat rodeo from the inside.

As we pass the year’s mid-point, I’ve had the good fortune to conduct more site visits at law firms and law departments. And, as always, I’ve attended an obscene number of conferences [at one right now]. I’ve seen quite a bit and heard even more. Overall, I’m optimistic. An admittedly skewed sample of major industry players are moving in directions I applaud (confirmation bias is only a few degrees away from social proof). But the inescapable conclusion from gaining visibility into so many organizations is that everyone—and I mean everyone, me included—has plenty of room for improvement. Those who refuse to concede their imperfections, even in private, are doing the industry a disservice. Continue Reading The Legal Department Goat Rodeo