It is not often that my role in the world as the Canadian Geek Add-On enables me to write about things happening in the Legal Research world up here, north of the border. But today, I have the honour and privilege to share with all 3 Geeks Readers, who share my interest in technology, law libraries, and access to information about CanLII Connects. I am not the only one who has noticed, and it was recently profiled in the ABA’s Legal Rebels cause you know that’s how we roll up here. And, Connects, was also featured earlier in the year on Slaw with commentary by Connie Crosby. That post can be read here. 

But six or so months in, I thought I could highlight Connects, which is focused on building a community of contributors to promote the discussion and synthesis of legal issues, tying it all back to the primary law. What’s different about CanLII Connects is that it’s gathering and re-publishing existing case commentary as well as attracting new, original material. Connects launched in April and now has more than 30,000 documents, hundreds of members (lawyers, law students, professors, judges, and law librarians), dozens of law firm publisher accounts, and scores of contributing authors. 

I think this is important to share for a few reasons, first and foremost, Connects cuts through the clutter, providing commentary with your case law, which makes it easy for anyone to understand Canadian law. Whether, you are from here or otherwise. Secondly, its proof that there is innovation in legal internet content, not just more data being created which is always a refreshing change. Practice of law aside, Connects is also it’s a great place to look at the business of law as well. You can check out who is publishing, what they are saying and assess the impact. The fact that I get to share a Canadian legal tech and content story with a primarily American audience is just icing on the TimBit.  

So, next time you are looking for some Canadian content, check out CanLII Connects! 

Previously I posted on some knowledge gained at the Bridgeway Conference in Nashville. I wanted to add one more item to the list.

Jeff Paquin, who now works with Bridgeway, gave a presentation called Legal Department 2050. He started by looking back at the evolution of legal departments and then projected forward on what the future might hold for them. In looking back he noted that since the mid 80’s, legal departments have grown substantially. Back then about 5% of the legal budget went to pay the in-house team. A recent report shows this number is now approaching 50%. Quite a bit of this growth has occurred recently with legal departments pulling more work away from outside counsel.

Numerous reports and posts have shown that in-house legal departments have become one of the biggest competitors for outside counsel. This is not news to law firms since they are hiring these people directly from those firms. Later at the conference I had one client comment to me on the challenges they are having maintaining relationships with law firms, since they keep hiring their primary relationship lawyers away from the firms.

Jeff then took this concept and projected it forward. He runs a group called the Legal Futurists Society. Based on the collective thinking for this group, they see this growth peaking in the next 10 years.

Jeff posed a question to the audience. He asked what we saw resulting from this trend. A hand shot up quickly followed by, “Scrutiny.” Everyone agreed that as legal departments’ personnel came to represent greater portions of the budget, cost concerns would shift from law firms to the legal departments.

Here are my follow-on thoughts:

#1 – My reaction beyond ‘scrutiny’ was that legal departments are just becoming law firms. This means they will now be burdened with all the same problems a firm has in terms of infrastructure. What do they have for document management? What about KM and all of the other tools firms have in place? This will be a significant challenge for them, since law firms are still trying to figure all of this out and they are years ahead of legal departments.

Which leads to my second thought …

#2 – In-sourcing doesn’t appear to be changing the model much. Legal departments don’t seem to be ‘doing law’ much differently. They are just doing it with lower cost resources. So the cost savings realized will only be marginal. And it won’t take long for corporate leadership to realize that limitation – and to notice the size of the department has grown considerably.

So I think Jeff and the group are right. A lot more scrutiny will come to bear on legal departments. As they grow in size and cost, the cost saving target will shift from law firms’ to their backs.

What’s good for the goose …?

Last week I was able to attend the Bridgeway Customer Connective Conference in Nashville. Unlike many of the conferences I attend, this one is directed at clients, not law firms.

One of the sessions I attended really got my attention. Pratik Patel and Peter Eilhauer of  Elevate presented on a Practical Data-Driven Roadmap for Spend Management. This was primarily a case study on how one client approached cost control for their outside counsel. Pratik gave an excellent presentation on how the client took a methodical approach to understanding its legal spend by analyzing how and where it had been spending its budget. Then they took a step-by-step approach to tackling the problem.

One component of the analysis was understanding the rates the client was paying on a practice-by-practice basis. Normally I find this type of analysis marginally useful, since rates are only one component of cost control. However, the practice breakdown was interesting, since it separated out different specialities. This meant tax lawyers were not being lumped in with labor lawyers.

With this breakdown the client was able to determine market rates by timekeeper level for each type of service. For their needs, it didn’t matter whether these were market rates on the broader level or not. Then they identified firms with rates above these client-based market rates.

And here’s where it got interesting. Pratik asked the audience how many firms pushed back on the client when they asked the firms about the discrepancy. He prefaced this by saying the client expected that number to be 50%. People gave various guesses, including mine which was “low.”

The number was 5%.

Pratik singled me out – since I was the only law firm person in the room and asked me why firms didn’t push back. I replied it was firms’ superior negotiation tactics in action – which got a good laugh. Then on a more serious note, someone else commented that he viewed it as an admission by the firms that they had been over-charging the client.

Ouch.

The Lessons:

  1. Pratik made a point early on that the client did not want to push too hard on their firms. They want their law firm partners to be financially healthy. In fact the other presentations I saw at the conference echoed that sentiment. Although clients are wary of their firms, they don’t want to be mean about it.
  2. And when firms react as if they have been charging high rates, they can be sending a bad message. If they act like they have been treating the relationship poorly, then they shouldn’t be surprised when clients view it that way.
  3. Lastly – law firms need to grow a pair. They employ very talented people. Instead of always bending over, they should have some confidence in defending their prices. Failing to do so means they will undersell the value of their services.

The legal market needs to mature around these ideas. This chaotic, wild west situation is resulting in many unintended consequences. As usual, I continue to recommend that lawyers take a more proactive approach to dealing with all of this change. To shy away from this, only leads to confusion and unhealthy relationships.

The following is the final part of a 4 part post expanding on my short introduction to an ILTA session entitled, Do Robot Lawyers Dream of Billable Seconds? If you have not yet listened to the full session (and you have nothing better to do for the next 90 minutes), you should go listen to it now. If you would like to download and read the entire 4-part post you can get it here.



What does an Exponential Law Firm that can survive in this type of environment look like?

I would be lying if I said I knew for sure, but I think we can look to a number of trends and begin to get a fuzzy picture of the future.

More Legal Processing will be passed off to computers

We like to pretend that everything we do is custom tailored for every client, but it is simply not true. We are already past the point where we need to improve efficiency in order to provide a better price to our clients. In the near future, we will need to improve efficiency in order to make a profit. That means we will need an honest assessment of the work that can be automated, or performed by algorithm, and the work that will require custom analysis by specialized attorneys. Then we will begin pricing that work accordingly.

The rise of the Legal Processing Engines

This obviously goes hand in hand with the above, but one of the implications of this change is that the output of biological legal processing units (most attorneys) will shift from customized legal work, to engine building and maintenance. The focus of many firm attorneys will no longer be on individual clients, but on entire types of matters at once. Attorneys will no longer slave over a single contract, but over the engine that builds that type of contract.

Engines will manage as much work as they can and spit out any unique or unusual work to be reviewed by senior attorneys. That “unique” work will be analyzed and evaluated to determine whether it can or should be incorporated into the engine for future use. Over time the engines will do more and more complex work.

The rise of the Legal Engineer

Inherent in the rise of the Legal Engine is the role of Legal Engineer. We are already seeing this role pop up at many firms. These are people with legal training and technology “know how”. They are equally comfortable analyzing contracts and programming new applications. There are very few people who fit this role today in big law firms, but firms who want to survive post disruption will hire these people by the truckload. The engineers will be responsible for creating and maintaining the firm’s engines. As laws change, or interpretations change, the engineer will modify the engine appropriately.

Machine Readable Documents

Once we are using engines to process legal matters anyway, it will make sense to just go all the way and make all legal documents machine readable. Gone are the fuzzy shades in meaning between contains and includes, or the differences between shall and must, to be replaced by the definitive ⊇ and =.

Proactive Practice of Law

In this world, firms will stop being reactive. The idea of waiting for a client to approach the firm before working on a matter will be unthinkable. Legal engineers will build engines based on legislation and firm sales associates (or Partners) will pitch those engines to potential clients.

Is this Science Fiction?

Simply put: computers process information more consistently, accurately, and faster than people do. They are networkable, scalable, and manageable in large numbers by relatively few administrators. If I am right in my assessment that what we actually sell to clients is Legal Processing, then no, this is not science fiction. In order to compete in an exponentially changing industry, we will have to move the bulk of our processing from biological to digital processing units.

If Diamandis’ exponential framework is correct, then we are approaching a digital disruption that will fundamentally change our industry forever. The players will change. New firms will quickly morph from newcomers into industry leaders. Many of the old guard will fail to change and will subsequently fail entirely. And a few will probably stick around, doing things much as they always have for a very select, demanding, and equally slow to change clientele. At least until those clients also get disrupted.

Whether or not I am right about what we sell, or that the framework directly applies to the legal industry, is almost irrelevant. The 6 Ds Framework provides a useful model for imagining the kinds of changes that could take place in our industry, based on the kinds of technological changes that have already upended other industries.

The only thing of which I am absolutely positive is that both lawyers and IT personnel, as a general rule, do not think much beyond the next immediate hurdle. They approach the world linearly, solving problems as they arise, and planning for a steady progression of linear events. But if we are already on a path of exponential change, then our standard linear approach to managing firms will be our demise. A purely linear response to an exponential threat is the equivalent of no response at all.  

The following is the 3rd part of a 4 part post expanding on my short introduction to an ILTA session entitled, Do Robot Lawyers Dream of Billable Seconds? If you have not yet listened to the full session (and you have nothing better to do for the next 90 minutes), you should go listen to it now. If you would like to download and read the entire 4-part post you can get it here.


What does this mean for legal service delivery?

The examples above are not directly comparable to the
legal services we provide. I deliberately did that to illustrate the 6 Ds
concept before completely confusing the issue by describing how it applies to
our industry. As it is, I’m sure more than a few of you have read the examples
above screaming, “Yes, but that has nothing to do with us! What the hell are
you talking about?”

I am more than willing to concede that I may be wrong
about the legal industry passing a threshold of digitization in any way similar
to the entertainment industries or physical goods manufacturers. Or, that
Diamandis may be wrong about industries passing that threshold and then
necessarily conforming to his exponential framework. But for the sake of
argument, let’s say that Peter and I are not wrong. We are definitely passing a
threshold, an industry wide digital disruption will eventually take place, and
we will begin to conform to the exponential framework just as others have. That
begs the question, what does a dematerialized, demonetized, and democratized
legal services industry look like, and how could a law firm survive in it?

The Dematerialized Practice of Law

It’s likely that the first complaint against applying the
6 Ds framework to the practice of law will be that we are not a material
industry, and that we therefore have a distinct advantage over manufacturers or
sellers of things. We don’t produce material goods, unless you count mountains
of documents, and even if we become entirely paperless there will be no change
in our service.

That might be true, but let’s think about a service
provider who has already gone through this digital threshold: travel agents.
Travel agents still exist of course, although in nothing like the numbers they
did 20 years ago. They provided a service, with almost no material aspect and
yet they were one of the first industries to be decimated by the rise of the
internet. It turns out most people were happy to book travel themselves as long
as it was easy and inexpensive. How many people or companies would gladly
handle their own legal services if they had access to resources and knowledge,
for a low price, and they didn’t actually have to deal with a real live
attorney?  If such a thing were possible,
how many attorneys could the industry continue to support?

The Demonetized Practice of Law

We have seen downward pressure on legal prices since the
downturn of 2007.  That has mostly come
in the form of clients demanding discounts on hourly rates or fixed fee
arrangements. But suppose clients, even large corporate clients, had a new option:
they could pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to a firm sponsored set of
expertise engines that handled much of their routine legal needs. They could
pay month to month for this a la carte service, or they could sign a 2 year
contract which also entitled them to steeply discounted hourly rates for legal
services not covered by the engines. Setting aside for the moment, whether such
a thing is possible, or more to the point, whether the bar associations would
allow it, what would that do to legal service prices?

The Democratized Practice of Law

This is the good news, if the prices of legal services
decline precipitously and the delivery of legal services becomes much more
widely available, then the pool of potential clients will be significantly
larger than today’s client pool. Smaller companies and individuals who
currently choose to do without external legal counsel and instead turn to
LegalZoom or other form providers, could suddenly be approaching big firms to
handle their legal needs.

Some of you are thinking, “But that’s not the kind of law
we practice, we do big law for big corporations.” To which I will respond, look
around you. The era of the big corporation is ending. The average lifespan
of a company on the S&P 500 has fallen from 60+ years in 1960 to just
over 15 years today. There will probably always be some big corporations, but I
don’t think they will be the norm.

Relatively small companies like AirBnb (600 employees) and
Uber (~1,000 employees) are taking on much larger and more traditional service
providers, and they are having success. AirBnb and Uber are valued at $10Bn and
$15Bn, respectively. These are new types of companies that grow quickly, by
connecting people who have services to offer to those who need them, and taking
a percentage. This is relevant to us on two fronts: 1) If given the choice of
monthly subscription fees for access to legal engines or more traditional legal
services, which do you think these startups would choose? AND, 2) How long
before the law firm equivalent of AirBnb or Uber start selling them these
services?

(Tomorrow: What does an Exponential Law Firm that can survive in this type of environment look like?)

The following is the second part of a 4 part post that expands upon a short introduction I gave to an ILTA session entitled, Do Robot Lawyers Dream of Billable Seconds? If you have not yet listened to the full session (and you have nothing better to do for the next 90 minutes), you should go listen to it now. If you would like to download and read the entire 4-part post you can get it here.


The 6 Ds: An Exponential Framework

Image from Peter Diamandis’ presentation to ILTA.

On the first day of this year’s ILTA conference, I attended the keynote session presented by Peter Diamandis. Diamandis is the founder of the X-Prize and Singularity University. In corporate-speak, Diamandis is not just an “outside the box” thinker, he tore the box apart, set the pieces on fire, and urinated on the flames. I watched his speech in rapt attention, increasingly fired up by what he was saying. I imagined the headlines that would appear in the news the following day, “Angry Nerds burn down Gaylord Opryland Hotel!” or, “Diamandis Sparks Legal Geek Riot”. But strangely, at the end of his talk he received polite smattering of applause and the assembled nerds quietly stood and shuffled out of the ballroom toward the first coffee break of the day.

It was clear that not everyone heard what I heard. Because I heard Diamandis say, “Most of your firms will not exist in a few years. Much of this conference is a waste of time. You should all go find new jobs.” Of course, he didn’t put it that bluntly, but if you pull his remarks together and add up all the pieces, I think that was the underlying message.

One slide in particular had a profound effect on me. So much so that I scrapped the introduction I had written for my session later in the week and instead talked about this one concept: The 6 Ds.

Diamandis calls the 6 Ds an Exponential Framework. I struggled with that name for a long time, but I couldn’t come up with a better one either. It’s not a process; the Ds don’t necessary happen sequentially. It’s not a workflow, or an organizing principle. Model, pattern, and path don’t quite fit either. It’s just a framework that industries begin to take on once they cross the threshold of the first D.

Digitization

Perhaps you can begin to see why I needed such a lengthy preamble to this post. We have already crossed, or we are at the very least currently crossing, the digitization threshold in the practice of law. Diamandis’ framework suggests that crossing that threshold has entirely foreseeable consequences and that if we want our firms to survive, we must prepare them to exist in a completely different industry than the analog one we have lived in to this point.

The premise is that digitizing a product or a service throws an entire industry onto the Moore’s law bandwagon. Change within that industry immediately becomes exponential as processing power doubles and prices halve every 18 months.

I will cover each of these in turn, but the remaining 5 Ds that follow from this initial act of Digitization are:

  • Deceptive (initial change)
  • Disruption
  • Dematerialization
  • Demonetization
  • Democratization

Deceptive

This D is tough because it is the only one that describes a state of being rather than an action or direct change. The idea is that even though change immediately begins to happen exponentially, it still appears to be slow or even non-existent. This mis-perception is a product of our human inability to intuit exponential change. In real terms, even exponential growth appears static at very small levels. For example, without a high powered microscope, you would have a difficult time recognizing the initial exponential growth of bacteria in a petri dish. One cell becomes two, two become four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on.  For a long period of time, you would swear nothing is happening at all, and then BAM! an obvious explosion of growth. The rate of growth in that example is constant, but our perception of it is that it happened all at once; out of the blue.

Arguably, this is where we currently are in the legal industry. We are digitizing our practice and we have begun the process of exponential change, but that change is still small and very hard to see.

Disruption

Disruption is the elbow in the graph; the point at which change goes from near horizontal to near vertical over a very short period of time. That’s the point at which it becomes impossible for anyone to seriously argue that a significant and industry altering change has not occurred. The horizontal underline that turns into the letter L in the word “exponential” on the image above was created in Excel. It is an actual graph of steady exponential growth. You can see conceptually how deceptively small change can sneak up on an industry and give way to massively large disruption.

Diamandis argues that we have seen many industries crossing the digital threshold and that they all begin to follow this same framework. The last 3 Ds represent the post-disruption world.  They don’t necessarily happen in any particular order; they are more like directions that a digitally disrupted industry begins to head.

Dematerialization

Once a product or service is digitized, the materials (physical goods and associated services) begin to disappear. Kodak learned this the hard way when most people decided that the crappy digital camera attached to their phone was good enough. They stopped carrying dedicated cameras, and buying and processing film. Sales of physical books are down since the Kindle debuted. Who buys CDs or DVDs anymore? Physical media is wasteful, and expensive, and unnecessary. Just enumerating the physical goods that have been supplanted by the “phone” in your pocket would take pages.

Demonetization

Disrupted industries have seen the total amount of money that customers are willing to spend for non-material goods decrease significantly post-disruption. That is not to say that there is no money to be made, simply that the players who survive are often fighting over a smaller pool of available revenue or they have to grow significantly in volume to make up for the decrease in per unit cost. For example, digital music and movie downloads can no longer command the same premium prices that CDs and DVDs once did. Entire secondary industries based on distribution of physical media have dried up. Virgin Mega Stores and Blockbuster Video, once multibillion dollar juggernauts have disappeared and been replaced by digital distributors, like Spotify and Netflix, selling monthly unlimited access to entire libraries of media for the former price of a bargain bin album.

Democratization

Finally, the 6th D follows naturally from the 4th and 5th. If a good or service is now digitized and available online, and its price is now affordable to most people, then it is democratized.  Everyone can have access to it. This is the digital publishing revolution of which we at 3 Geeks have taken terrific advantage. Fifteen or 20 years ago, we could have published a newsletter that might have reached a couple of hundred people within a small region of the US. We would have had publishing and distribution costs. We would have probably charged a subscription fee. We would have needed someone to manage all of that for us, because frankly, we’re too lazy to do those things ourselves. Today, however, we have readers all over the world who read our non-sense daily and it costs us nothing but our time.

(Tomorrow: What does this mean for legal service delivery?)
The following is the 1st part of a 4 part post expanding on my short introduction to an ILTA session entitled, Do Robot Lawyers Dream of Billable Seconds? If you have not yet listened to the full session (and you have nothing better to do for the next 90 minutes), you should go listen to it now. If you would like to download and read the entire 4-part post you can get it here.



Computers

During World War II, a “computer” was a person who
calculated ballistic trajectories and published the results in books and sets
of tables that were given to artillery units and battle ship commanders. These
computers were mostly women who manually processed the calculations applying
complex mathematics and their substantial brain power to the task. They worked
in teams, checking and quadruple-checking each other’s work, as incorrect
results could quite literally affect the outcome of the war and lead to the
deaths of many soldiers on the front lines.

After the war, many of these computers were instrumental
in programming and debugging their brand new, building-sized, electronic
namesakes. Today, the term computer is never used to refer to a person.

These women were certainly not the first laborers to lose
their jobs to machines. The industrial revolution had seen many manual labor
positions replaced by newly developed engines, from coal powered steam shovels,
to electric sewing machines. But these “computers” were probably the first
knowledge workers (people that rely on their brain processing power rather than
their physical skill) to lose their jobs to machines.

Over the last seventy years that process has continued
unabated, with ever smarter electronic computers tackling more complex and
complicated knowledge work. And at every step of the process the next
profession in line had a million and one reasons why “a computer could never do
what they do.” But today we live in the world of IBM’s Watson. Watson is not a
miracle, it’s the natural progression from those World War II era computers, to
ENIAC, to the Personal Computer revolution, to the Smartphone, and eventually
to a computer that beats the best humans at the most difficult of human games;
Chess two decades ago, Jeopardy a few years back, and Settlers of Catan every
night on my iPad.

More impressive than my iPad beating me at a popular
German board game is the Watson victory on Jeopardy. Computers are now exhibiting
what were once considered uniquely human abilities: parsing and processing
natural language, understanding puns, and double meanings, and then determining
the intention of the questioner in order to select a correct solution from many
plausible answers. That is not terribly far removed from parsing the exact
meaning and intention of legal documents and then determining an appropriate
course of action based on precedent and prior analysis. The legal profession
should be on notice: the computers are coming.

What do we sell?

A few years ago I asked a number of my friends and
colleagues from other firms three questions:
  1. What do
    Lawyers think they sell?
  2. What do
    Law Firms think they sell?
  3. What do
    Clients think they are buying?
While none of the respondents gave the same three answers,
they all agreed that there were separate answers to each question. That kind of
confusion leads to all kinds of marketplace chaos and I tried to suggest a
common answer, that we were selling “access to the collective knowledge and
expertise of the firm.” That was not a satisfying answer to me, even then. The
question has continued to nag at me ever since, and after much consideration, I
am ready to suggest a new answer: We sell Legal Processing.

That doesn’t feel emotionally satisfying either, but the
more I think about it, the more convinced I am that that should be the simple
answer to all three questions. Clients typically come to us with legal problems
and we run those problems through our legal processing engines (attorneys,
established workflows) to produce advice, documents, in person counsel, or any
of the other things we commonly produce for clients. So, my original answer
wasn’t wrong, it just didn’t go deep enough. Lawyers are selling their legal
processing time, law firms are selling their collective legal processing
ability, and clients are buying the legal processing that they cannot or do not
want to do internally.

Much like the computers of World War II, the lawyers of
2014 continue to do most of that processing using their biological processing
units. These brains, as we call them, are extremely energy efficient and fast,
but are slow to train, prone to fatigue, often make mistakes, and are
notoriously difficult to network (not to mention the hardships of managing
them).

Digital Legal Processing

In recent years, we have entered a new era for the
practice of law, the digital era. The digital era probably began in earnest
with the explosion of e-discovery solutions in the last decade. These tools
were not simply technological means of improving the analog workflow, like a
Document or Contact Management System, these applications were beginning to do
the actual work that previously required lots of young associates with a great
deal of management supervision. With predictive analysis, many fewer associates
could do the same work in much less time, more accurately.

I have seen no fewer than 5 contract review applications
in the last few months that promise to reduce processing time and to increase
accuracy by large percentages. Eventually, these tools will most likely replace
biological processing units entirely. Even now, a large document review that
relied entirely on human ability, engaging no computer assistance at all, would
most likely leave a firm open to a malpractice suit. It is not a huge stretch
to imagine a time in the near future, when biological processing interference
of any kind, might do the same.

E-discovery and contract review applications are one type
of digital legal processing. They are essentially highly skilled and ever
improving pattern recognition tools, but obviously the practice of law does not
boil down to simply better pattern recognition. It also requires an
understanding of current laws, an ability to apply a client’s particular
circumstances to the current laws, and to make inferences, calculations, and
recommendations based on that understanding of the law. This is where Expertise
Systems enter.

Expertise systems allow firms to capture an individual
lawyer’s (or an entire practice group’s) knowledge and understanding of a
particular law, in a way that allows other lawyers or clients to use that
knowledge, even if they do not have access to the original lawyer(s). In other
words, with an expertise system, it is possible to build legal processing
engines that handle the routine aspects of practicing law, leaving the novel
and unique to be handled by the firm’s biological legal processing units
(attorneys).
Everything to this point is preamble to the next concept.

(Tomorrow: The 6 Ds: An Exponential Framework)

I had the privilege and pleasure of moderating a terrific panel at the ILTA conference this year.  The title of the session was the title of this post.  And the intention of the session was to explore, not WHAT new technology was coming down the pipe, but HOW that technology would fundamentally change lawyers, law firms, and the practice of law itself.

I am indebted to Jess Hutto-Schultz and the ILTA Committee for suggesting the topic and for allowing me to pick a truly ALL-STAR panel.

The panelists were:

Joshua Lenon, Lawyer in Residence at Clio (blog)

Noah Waisberg, CEO and Founder of Diligence Engine (blog)

Stuart Barr, Chief Operating Officer at HighQ (blog)

and Michael Mills, President and Chief Strategy Officer at Neota Logic (blog)

Each of the panelists have already posted their personal accounts of the session and I urge you to read them via the blog links above. This was truly an amazing session and I’m not just saying that because I was involved. Take a look at what some of the attendees said:

“Another fantastic session with a great panel. Please bring them back for more.”

“Can’t emphasize enough how superb this session was. Excellent and well-informed panel with excellent moderator…” (Bonus points for whomever said this one. – RM)

“This should have been earlier in the week”

“Fantastic! Best session at ILTA!!”

“Great panel. Very thought provoking.”

“Great session that used the panel format well to put forward alternate views.”

“INCREDIBLE SESSION!! All speakers were amazing. Content was relevant, informative, interesting, and fun!”

“Outstanding panel, wide scope, though-provoking but realistic.”

“Thoughtful and provocative. I especially enjoyed Michael Mills’ commentary.”

Lest you think I cherry-picked only the best comments, those are ALL of the comments.  Some of them went on much longer and I shortened them so as to not completely embarrass our brilliant and humble panelists.

My personal thoughts, inspired and informed by this session, will be posted here starting on Monday morning. And yes, I do have a tendency to go on a bit, so those thoughts will continue through until at least Thursday.  But for your Friday afternoon and Weekend enjoyment, I present the full presentation of Do Robot Lawyers Dream of Billable Seconds? from ILTA 2014. 


The video is about 90 minutes long, so go get some popcorn. If you are interested in the future of law, or robot lawyers, you will not regret it. If you are not interested in those things, I’m not sure how you stumbled onto this blog, but welcome!

(If the embedded video is not working, go to YouTube.  It is working there. )

736-hp VW Golf

Toby Brown and I have had a number of discussions over the past few months on how law firms gather information during the new business intake (NBI) process. Toby comments that all of the focus on NBI is process driven, and that we are speeding up the process, but not really doing a great job of creating better information that can help the firm create a competitive advantage at a later time. Very little in the NBI reform/reinvention process is about better data. It focuses more on faster input of information to speed up the time to open a new matter, thus creating a faster turnaround on when attorneys can start (legally) billing time to a matter. It’s kind of like putting a huge engine in a Volkswagen Golf. Sure, it looks impressive, but if keep the same overall structure of the vehicle it doesn’t matter that you have amazing horsepower, if you can’t get those wheels to actually stick to the road. The same is true with the NBI process improvements.

Of course, with any of these process improvement projects, the idea is to solve problems that actually exist. Problems that “keep partners up at night” are usually the best ones to solve, and with NBI, the time it takes to open a new matter tends to be the biggest issue that partners dislike. Moving the NBI process from paper to electronic (even if the work flow process remains exactly the same) usually will speed up the time it takes to open the new matter. Tapping into existing client information, human resources, and accounting databases can help normalize some of the data, as well as auto-populate some of the fields. However, the information being gathered is essentially the same as you would get if you still had a paper-based system. Speed and accuracy have improved, but quality and better strategic data gathering has not.

So are we putting too much emphasis on the intake process, and not finding ways to improve identifying key data points of the matter? Once the matter is opened, no one wants to go back and update the data again. What if the matter type was wrong? What if the summary of the matter was wrong? What if the estimates of what this matter’s estimated costs were wrong? The typical reaction that I’ve seen to these questions is, “So what? If the matter is open, and we can bill… then let’s bill!”

Many of us depend upon the information gathered in the NBI process. Toby’s group attempts to analyze matter budgeting, matter management, and costs to take on a matter using details gathered in the NBI process. Marketing uses the data gather during the NBI process to determine big matters for Public Relations news releases, and submissions to third parties like Chambers. Business Development uses this information to determine what types of work the firms is strong and weak. Conflicts uses the information to determine what work we may not be able to take on in the future. Incomplete, or bad information gathered during NBI can have a long-range negative impact on the firm.

Let’s just call the new NBI process what it truly is: A way to open a matter quickly and ethically. Now, let’s identify what new NBI process is not: A competitive intelligence, business development, knowledge management, big-data tool. At least, not by itself. Perhaps if you combine the data from the NBI system with other pieces compiled along the timeline of the matter (e.g., billing data, financial data, personnel data, document records, docket information), you can improve the ability to make good decisions and streamline other processes, but bad data in the beginning can cause a domino effect down the line. If a matter type is mislabeled during the NBI process, it can cause a shift in results in later analysis. So, what do we do?

I’m reminded of a post we did a couple years ago on firms needing to do After-Action Reviews for matters. If we don’t ask ourselves what happened, and how can we get better, we tend to continue to act in a similar fashion (good or bad) in the future. If we misidentify information, and never incentivize partners to correct that information, we’ll continue to misidentify. Most firms have absolutely no incentives for partners to identify when information gathered during NBI process needs to be clarified or corrected. We also give almost no incentives to close matters. Yet, both of those processes are key pieces in our quest to better know our clients (KYC), gather BI/CI information, assist in identifying cross-selling opportunities, and gathering historical information to better plan how we price and staff similar matters in the future. I would think that the return on investment in beefing up a mid-matter review (MMR), and the closing matter process (CMP) would be substantial.

Just off of the top of my head I could think how a quick MMR and a sustained CMP process would help trim down the time it takes to identify key matters to be used for PR purposes. How it would accurately identify which attorneys are experienced in certain matter types. And, how it would assist in business intelligence gathering when pitching for client RFPs or new firm industry business pushes. I understand that the MMR and CMP procedures require billable attorneys to take time out from billing and actually identify the business development and overall matter management needs of the overall firm. Our first instinct would be to place this responsibility on the shoulders of the Billing Partner or Relationship Partner. We all know where that would lead… well, actually, that’s probably why were where we are at the present time. Instead, how about we look at this as a Professional Development, or as a Mentoring, or as a Succession Planning process? The MMR might be handled by a Senior Associate or Junior Partner and allow them to see how a matter is being staffed, and determine what has happened between the opening of the matter and the current state of the matter. The CMP could be handled by another Partner that worked on the matter, and allow them to also review what could be handled better the next time a similar matter is opened. A quality MMR and CMP structure allows for better data, better matter management, and a better leader for the next matter.

Perhaps we stop thinking of the New Business Intake in a vacuum. Instead we combine the NBI, MMR, and CMP into an overall process of cradle-to-grave matter management. The NBI is step-one, and should be improved to help speed up the process of getting matters opened, conflicts checked, people assigned, and have the firm start working on behalf of a client. But it is step one only. If we ever want to leverage our prior work in order to improve or gain new work, then the NBI cannot be the first and only step.

Someone asked me recently why I think more and more law firms are creating CI roles or increasing their CI capacity, encouraging their BD and Library staff to work more closely so forth. I didn’t really have a good answer on the spot, “cause it makes good business sense, or because market competition and consolidation is increasing” seemed all to obvious and do not address this specific moment in the evolution of the modern law firm.  Last month, I participated in a webinar presented by Ann Lee Gibson, long time law firm CI consultant as a part of the IntelCollab webinar series and unknowingly, Ann Lee answered the question in part.  Her presentation was titled How Competitive Intelligence Helps Professional Services Firms Succeed, and you can view the entire presentation here.  The focus wasn’t specifically on law firms, but by not focusing, certain things became clear.  To begin the various US based professional services firms are compared  by revenue, number of employees and number of professionals.  According to the data, law firms had the highest revenue in 2013, but also the greatest number of employees (costs) but NOT the highest growth rate, nor does the profession represent the largest number of businesses in the professional services.  Furthermore, when compared to Accounting firms, the 2013 data  points out that 75% of revenue in law firms comes from 53 firms, whereas in the Accounting sector that same percentage of revenue is drawn from four firms.  So putting on the CI analyst hat here, what do the numbers tell you? Not surprisingly, especially if you follow any of Toby’s posts, law firms are running inefficient organizations, with leverage issues as a result of the many many owners. I am not the economist so won’t get into the numbers except to say that law firms are increasing CI as way to minimize the impact of the figures.  But even forgetting the economics for a second, you can see from the literature, the blog posts and the new titles that are popping up all across law firms that something is happening.   

Twenty, even 15 years ago firms only had to worry about appeasing clients, doing good work and getting more work from the same or other clients. Few firms were concerned in any systemic way about their competitors and even fewer were thinking about clients in terms of their needs and wants. Today, that landscape has entirely changed.  Clients are driving change at firms by demanding attention be it through: AFAs, LMP, LPO, and/or e-billing. Add to that the growing impact of technology on both the business and practice of law, industry consolidation nationally and internationally, growing in house legal teams, changes to the ownership rules for law firms and firms are forced to be more competitive.  How a firm chooses to be more competitive can (and does) come in varied forms.  Some are shrinking administrative costs and reducing overhead by creating pools of assistants rather than the traditional 1:1 of firms, shrinking headcount or budget for things like KM, Marketing and Library services. Others are taking a different approach choosing to focus on understanding their clients, their markets, their competitors and their own business savvy better.  That’s where CI enters the mix and helps to set the course.  CI is a strategic endeavour in understanding the market condition, the forces of pressure and their impact while also being tactical in informing RFP responses, filling the pipeline and providing colour in addition to background information.  CI, when done well can be the centre point for collaboration and competitive advantage within in a firm. 

There is no denying that the legal industry is changing. The speed of the change depends on where you sit, what you see, and where you want to go, but no one can deny that as the legal industry ship is steering in a different direction, and firms are realizing the power of CI as the compass to help navigate the waters.