Strategic Legal Technology

Real time blog post on ILTA 2009 session: Technologies that Will Disrupt Traditional Legal Practice with Richard Susskind, author of The End of Lawyers? and “legal futurist"; Gerard Neidistch, Executive Director Business Integration and Technology of Mallesons; and by John Alber, Technology Partner of Bryan Cave. (Posted at close of session without editing.)  

[Note: this session is very well-attended. I estimate over 100. The hotel is bringing in more chairs.]

Richard Susskind

Will address three topics: (1) what is disruption, (2) who is being disrupted, and (3) ten disruptive legal technologies.

What is a disruptive technology. Cites Clay Christensen Innovator’s Dilemma, who talksa bout sustaining versus disruptive. Latter seem to come from no where and disrupts the market. Incumbent players - and their customers - often dismiss new technologies. They don’t see the potential for disruption. Cites Christensen’s illustration of many industries disrupted by new technology. Susskind distinguishes between technology and business model. The technology is not nearly as interesting as the model.

For whom is the tech disruptive? For innovators, the disruptive tech provides competitive advantage For customers, it can provide new value. So the threat of disruption is only for followers. Notes that law firms are far more interested in avoiding disruption or being left behind than in gaining competitive advantage. Law firms only worry about what their peers do; they want to be in the pack, not ahead. So disruptive tech here means its disruptive for law firms that want to stay in the pack (RF: which is all the leading law firms).

Remembers first reading about death of billable hour in 1981. Susskind’s research suggest that at least 50% of general counsels still want billable hour. But thinks we are now, finally, moving away billable hour. Disruptive technologies challenge the billable hour.

Ten disruptive legal technologies that collectively will transform the market - but it will take several years if not longer:

• 1. Document Assembly. Notes the CEOs of big companies assume this is already widely in use. Cites some examples from UK where doc assembly changed the market (e.g., loan documents). Distinguish between internal D/A and external. For internal, you need a big volume. But if you make available online, then economics change because volume can be much higher. So you can go from production level of 10s or 100s to 1000s or more. Disruptive because of hours required up front and then the charges don’t relate to hours.
• 2. Relentless Connectivity. We are increasingly connected and present online. This can mean procedures to make sure that someone at a law firm is always available. Calls on lawyers’ time are increasing. This is relentless but we have to learn to deal with it.
• 3. The Electronic Legal Marketplace. Cites eBay as example of auction market. Lawyers think auctions and other online markets won’t affect them. This is ungrounded. Clients will be able to go online to select legal services. Sees no reason why law will be exempt from this when most other markets are moving in this direction. Electronic market will also make it easier for clients to find alternative providers (e.g., other professional, outsourcers)
• 4. E-Learning. Worries that law schools in Anglo countries don’t teach the right things. Law schools promote a romantic notion of the law that does not reflect reality of practice and evolving, new models of delivering new legal services. New simulation techniques are far superior to traditional Socratic method.
• 5. Online Legal Guidance. Interactive advisory systems will offer advice. This is progressing slowly. Notes that there are, in UK, many public sector websites that offer legal help. References “latent legal market” (RF: a concept Susskind developed in his prior book, The Future of Lawyers). Online system can provide guidance or documents. Cites a UK solo practitioner who developed extensive landlord tenant system and community.
• 6. Legal Open-Sourcing. Make law freely available a la Wikipedia. Is particularly interested in communities of interests. Suggests that community can come up with better answers than individuals. Notes that consumers are more willing to talk to friend who had similar problem than a lawyer.
• 7. Closed Legal Communities. We will see communities of just lawyers and legal professionals to share knowledge and experience. Cites the 9 London banks that came together a few years ago to “coerce” law firms to deliver their collective know-how. Mentions Legal Onramp. It’s disuprtive for law firms because clients can go somewhere else to start.
• 8. Workflow and Project Management. High volume, low value work can be routinized. There is no reason this work requires bespoke / custom attention. Some lawyers now say they are project managers - yet they have had virtually no training! PM is a discipline that requires significant training. Disruptive b/c this makes lawyers more productive so threatens the billable hour. You need project managers to manage multi-sourcing. Multi-source legal work means finding the best set of resources to solve a problem. This can include other professionals and outsourced services. Pull together multiple sources and put together for just in time delivery. A big question is who will do the project management.
• 9. Embedded Legal Knowledge. Uses playing solitaire on a computer as having game rules embedded in software. In the future, we will see systems with legal knowledge built into systems. You can embed knowledge into compliance systems. This will disrupt law firms because it reduces demand.
• 10. Online Dispute Resolution. Are courts a place or a service? Dispute resolution should be viewed as a service. Mentions CyberSettle service. This too will reduce demand for billable hours.

John Alber

Focus on automating low end legal advice. A recurring problem for clients is understanding US import and export restrictions. A company came to firm complaining about another firm that charged high rates to keep solving the same types of problems repeatedly. Bryan Cave decide to apply tech to solve the problem. The firm conscisouly decided to cannibalize its own hours by embodying know-how in a system. The process to capture the rules was time-consuming but the technology is not. So the firm developed an online legal service. So GC can turn to a system instead of a lawyer to answer a certain set of questions.

How did the firm package delivery? The firm sold access to system for flat fee of a couple hundred thousand dollars per year ($200,000). The lawyers at firm were relieved from boring work. Client get better legal results at lower cost, with predictable cost. Firm uses the software to train new lawyers. A big benefit was that client shifted its higher end trade work (that system was not designed to handle) to Bryan Cave from another firm.

Another example is Streamlining Due Diligence. Problem is that wireless carriers regularly trade frequencies. Any sale / trade of wireless spectrum requires significant due diligence (similar to any asset transfer). Need to look at leaseholds, asset documentation, easements, etc. Moving a portfolio of spectrums can be very expensive. The deals can take so long to due diligence that the deal cannot be done. So the model has to change to support a company’s ability to move portfolios of spectrums.

Just dropping fees was not enough. Instead, the firm developed an automated workflow system. The firm created a system that allows contract lawyers to conduct the due diligence. Embedded know-how in software so that more junior (read cheaper) lawyers could do the work. The system takes lawyers through the workflow and captures information. This allowed capturing required documentation. Result is a “factory workfloor staffed with contract lawyers supervised by experienced lawyers.”

The firm reduced the cost per spectrum transfer by two-thirds and reduced turnaround time from months to weeks. The client can now do deals that it could not previously do. No other law firm can compete for this business. The hard part is the human process, not the technology.

Gerard Neiditsch

Discusses Mallesons Connect. This is an extranet but doesn’t look like it. It has a lot of workflow built into it. Removes “black box” approach so that clients could see what work is being done and when. Mallesons wanted to provide predictable service levels, demonstrate value, provide round-the-clock service. For clients, system provides project progress, financial reports, alerts, current awareness, training, resource availability, secure deal and data rooms, automatic data generation, sophisticated security, and (in next release) correspondence and know-how.

References PeopleFinder, which is an internal system the firm developed, to locate lawyers in real-time (for internal use). Goal was to answer more calls in real time. Connect is an extension in some ways of this system but with different emphasis since it’s client facing.

Shows a screen shot of Mallesons Connect. It shows total projects, active projects, and unpaid invoices. Provides detail on Active Projects. “My Feed”. All Web 2.0 technology - everything is interlinked and dynamic. Mouse-over an active project shows key info including WIP and key contact and if that contact is currently available. A more detailed screen shows fee-earner calendars and contact info. Provides faceted search across portfolio of projects. Financial summary page provides graphics and tabular summary. All data are real-time.

So far, five clients use the system. Goal is to have 30 largest clients using.

From Q&A: when there was a change in key personnel at client, Connect helped provide continuity.

Questions and Answers

Q: Clients want to use own systems - how did you break down that resistance.
A: Gerard: clients did not have own system so we did not face that challenge. They were eager for tools.
A: Richard: if client is not willing, don’t push that hard; others will be willing

Q: What is legal spend in Australia versus US and is that a factor in Connect uptake?
A: Gerard: we see procurement and other non-lawyers getting involved in purchasing. But divisional business managers are also involved in purchasing decision.

Q: For John: with trade compliance tools, how did you deal with pricing? How do you make sure you are not actually losing money?
A: We took a flyer on pricing, guessing on both costs and value and what client was willing to pay, with ability to adjust. This is how a lot of business works.

Crafting an Effective Strategy is an ITLA 2009 executive track session with panelists Greg Kaple, Senior Partner of Integrated Management Services, Inc. and Ash Banerjee, CIO of WilmerHale. I am attending the ILTA 2009 annual conference. This is a real-time blog post. 

Ash explains where WilmerHale strategic plan is today. 2500 people, 12 offices, 1000 lawyers. Ash at firm about one year, came from music industry. Started with assessing needs: practice heads, admin managers; met 70 people around the firm. Collected benchmark data from throughout the firm. Distilled a lot of information into key needs and issues, along with plan of what to do about each. Summarized to 3 pages - short is key. Distilled this to a bulls-eye target: governance process in center, surrounded by platform stability, then surrounded by (1) knowledge and content managment (KM and CM), (2) litigation support, and (3) admin support. Security surrounds the rest.

Achieving goals required a lot of change. Clarified IS role: leverage cost effective tech-based solutions, specifically, deliver solutions, tech services, and info and research. Note that platform / service delivery is distinct from solution and from info and research. Changed organization to align delivering on these goals. One big change was to move part of IS from an operations to a consulting organization. Created a team of 7 consultants; hired 5 from outside and 2 from inside. A lot of incumbents did not fit into new organization so hired quite a few new people into management team.

An internal IS consultant is assigned to each major practice group. This person is the IS advocate for that practice group. He or she has to understand that practice / business and how tech can meet new and even unarticulated needs.

Processes supporting new strategy include: Implemented a lot of metrics to determine if IS was delivering as it should. More rigorous performance management plan. Projects over certain dollar threshold require charters that formally justify. Governance process for IS includes a tech committee ("Steering Committee” with rep from each practice group and senior admin staff) and a project review board that signs off any new project. Service change ‘board’ reviews systems changes before executing.

Developed vision, principles, and roadmap for each of the major initiatives. This has been very effective in getting partner buy-in.

Project execution needed to be predictable. A project management office put together standard frameworks. IS applied service levels to measure to project. Metrics include lead times, effectiveness of changes, and number of projects (with number green, yellow, and red).

Lawyers have discussed alternative fee arrangements (AFA) since at least 1989, when I first became a law firm manager. The economic crisis adds fuel to the supposed AFA fire. Now, a new article by two prominent lawyers argues the merits of fixed fees, pointing out what it will take to get there. 

Two Veteran Lawyers Say Now Is the Time for Fixed Fees (Corporate Counsel, 24 Aug 2009), by Ben W. Heineman Jr. and William F. Lee (respectively, former General Electric Co. SVP & general counsel, now distinguished senior fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program on the Legal Profession and co-managing partner of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr), sets forth in detail the benefits of fixed fee billing to BigLaw and clients.

If nothing else, the article is interesting because of the prominence of its authors. Beyond that, it lays out different matter types and suggests fixed fee approaches for each. Further, it suggests specifics such as “data-mining techniques to determine reasonable ranges of cost for a wide variety of legal services” and project management. The authors’ comments on PM are especially interesting, not just because they say the words ‘project management’ but also for what they lump in with it:

“Law firms must develop project management capacity that combines sensitivity to quality with sensitivity to productivity. The time invested in a project will be managed as the project proceeds, rather than discussed after the fact… [client and firm must] learn to do more with less: the real definition of productivity. By the same token, in-house law departments must also develop project management capacity (and productivity measures for in-house lawyers).. For both in-house and outside lawyers, connective technology (e.g., general and specific deal documents, databases, or general and specific litigation documents) and selective outsourcing to third parties can help drive real productivity.” (emphasis added)

If the quoted text became reality, that would indeed be big. Almost every time I talk to partners about project management (or budgets for that matter), their eyes glaze over. Likewise, partner attention span for technology rarely exceeds a few seconds. And many BigLaw partners have gone on record about the putative horrors of outsourcing.

So, from my perspective, it’s great to see two prominent lawyers argue implicitly or explicitly for what I’ve advocated at this blog since 2003: technology for law practice productivity, business intelligence for both law firms and law departments, knowledge management (KM), a focus on the process of how to practice law, use of decision trees for risk analysis, risk-based decisions about how much to invest, and legal and middle office outsourcing.

I hope the authors will back their views with action, putting their considerable personal influence and their organizations’ resources behind their views. Many a legal market foot soldier or low-ranking officer have tried to go down the road they suggest, only to end up lying wounded on the side of the road. We now need the generals to lead. And the battle metaphor is intentional: changing how lawyers think and act will be hard indeed.

Update (24 Aug 2009): The Wall Street Journal today published ‘Billable Hour’ Under Attack, about fixed fees and AFA.

I have previously compared the health and legal professions, focusing on the evidenced-based approach in medicine and the appalling lack of anything like it in legal. Informed by the current national health care debate, I see another lesson for lawyers and law firm managers: find ways to limit over-consumption. 

Though over-consumption of health care is virtually off the table, it’s a huge problem. Why not have that extra test to eliminate a 1 in 10,000 risk - after all, someone else is paying? Why not consume a lot if no one even bothers to tell you the price in advance? I suspect over consumption by both clients and lawyers is a big problem.

Clients probably spend way too much on legal services though general counsels likely would disagree. I’ve discussed this in posts about whether cost control is really a GC priority. I suspect legal is like health care - the US spends much more than other countries for the same results.

Similarly, law firms likely over-consume support services. Law firms are to lawyers as insurers are to patients: a third party payer. Firms pay to support lawyers but lawyers determine how much service they consume - without knowing the price. Lawyers don’t even get the moral equivalent of an insurer’s “Explanation of Medical Benefits”. How many lawyers secretly or sub-consciously think “Why not have someone available to help me, I might need support between 10pm and 4am.” Or “Why not demand that a secretary sit outside my office 10 hours a day - my phone might ring and I can’t afford to have my calls answered by a central system.” Lawyers don’t pay the cost, so why not be safe rather than sorry?

Try this thought experiment: Give each lawyer a budget equivalent to the current support cost. Let the lawyer go up to 20% over but, at least for partners, make them pay 25% of any additional cost beyond that. Conversely, if at the end of the year, money is left from that pot, let the lawyer keep 50%. Would service consumption go up or down and is that good or bad? You tell me.

Update 22 Aug 2009 After writing above, I found similar idea by law department management consultant Rees Morrison in his post What if a law department gave each attorney an allowance to pay for support?, which suggests the possibility of creating a market for secretarial support services, where what an inhouse lawyer doesn’t spend stays with the lawyer.

The College of Law Practice Management is hosting a great “Futures” conference in September. I am a Trustee of COLPM. 

For the first time, the College is opening its program to the public. Two topics are on tap:
(1) the future of law firms and the legal profession and
(2) InnovAction Awards presentations.

On September 25-26, 2009, in Denver, Colorado, the College is co-hosting with the University of Denver Sturm College of Law the inaugural edition of the Futures Conference. Futures Conference program (PDF).

I’ve attended many College conferences and the quality of presentation and, more importantly, discussion is always outstanding, well above most other conferences. The format includes presentations, workshops and small-group discussions. Participants will have the chance to hear from and exchange views with leading innovative law practice managers. Some highligts include:

• Keynote presentation by Ward Bower of Altman Weil, who will provide an update on the Legal Transformation Study (particularly apt I think in this crisis)
• Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith Esq. wil discuss the Evolution of the Law Firm

Other speakers include Harry Trueheart, Chairman of Nixon Peabody LLP, Andy Adkins of the Legal Technology Institute, Ross Fishman of Fishman Marketing, Ann Lee Gibson of Ann Lee Gibson Consulting, Mark Greene, CMO of  Nixon Peabody, David Hambourger, CIO of Seyfarth Shaw LLP, Sally Fiona King, COO of Clifford Chance N.A., Carol Phillips, Director of Administration for the West Coast Offices of Sidley Austin LLP, Dan Pinnington of LawPRO,  Norm Rubenstein of the Zeughauser Group; and John Tredennick of Catalyst Repository Systems, among others.

At the conference, the College will also formally present the InnovAction winners with their awards. See my post InnovAction Awards for 2009 Announced for details. I’ve always found the presentations a great way to learn more detail and hear how legal leaders view the winners.

For those interested in the future of law and law firms, this is the place to be.

Dan Regard’s post The Fragmentation of the Communication Container at EDD Update blog raises important practical EDD considerations. Plus it suggests what metaphysical question about meaning. 

Dan writes that “methods of communication have changed over the last few years”. At one time he expected that the web would lead to big, complex documents where all the connections were clear. Instead, our communications “have become shorter, and more frequent, rather than larger and more complex. What was once sent in one letter, is now sent in 3 emails, or 5 texts, or 10 tweets. The size is smaller, the frequency is greater.”

Dan, an EDD authority, concludes that EDD will be more about “archeology", that is “re-assembling fragments of what once was… we will have more challenges (on the e-discovery side) to show complete conversations… Those conversations we do have will span days, not minutes. Sound bites will lend themselves to greater degrees of interpretation.” (emphasis added)

The EDD implications are clear. I want to pick up on Dan’s last comment about interpretation. I agree that as ‘the container fragments’, so too does meaning and intent. It can be hard enough to interpret old-fashioned back-and-forth dialogue after the fact. Scattering thread reduces clarity even more.

In real-time, the participants may remember where all the strands are or be inclined to interpret gaps in a positive light. But what happens after the fact, months or years later? As Dan suggests, just re-constructing the pieces is hard. It may be impossible. For example, 2 or more people may have a “conversation” simultaneously on Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, and Linkedin. The connection among and across media and time is in wetware (participants’ brains); explicit links may well be absent.

Historians or litigators may find it impossible to find all the pieces. Even if the participants are available and willing, they may be no more able to re-construct the full picture than a 3rd party. And even if you find all the pieces, do you face the moral equivalent of literary deconstructionism? Scattered text seems far more subject to interpretation than traditional media.

Litigators need to tell stories to win, historians to interpret. In the future, I suspect that far more stories and interpretations from scattered communications will be credible than what we have seen so far. Meaning and intent have always been hard to fathom. It looks like it will just get worse.

I read with interest the National Law Journal article Will Increased Compliance Burdens Lead to Legal Process Outsourcing? (12 August 2009) about using legal outsourcing to help meet new compliance requirements. 

In my June post Legal Outsourcing Tipping Point? I suggested that the publicity surrounding Rio Tinto’s legal outsourcing reflected a tipping point for the legal process outsourcing (LPO) market. The NLJ article puts more weight on the scale to tip the market.

For years (literally) most legal media articles about LPO questioned outsourcing and raised caution flags. Many quoted large law firm partners as skeptics. While I’m sure these views were honestly held, I never saw facts or analysis to back them up. Then came recent articles about Rio Tinto merely reporting the facts of an outsourcing deal. This week’s NLJ article may represent a further shift: from skeptics, the legal media are now virtually advocates.

The article explains the proposed federal Financial Regulatory Reform, that it would increase corporate compliance cost, and that general counsels should consider using offshore lawyers to do some of the work. The article is by an executive at an LPO so the advocacy is perhaps not surprising. The surprise, if any, is that the legal media published it as a news story.

Going beyond editorial decisions, the logic in the article applies equally to any heavily regulated area. That is, there is a lot of relatively routine legal work associated with many regs and such work is in the sweet spot of legal outsourcing.

In my pre-crash May 2008 post The Right Resources to Solve Legal Problems, I suggested that clients think systematically about their portfolio of legal problems and the optimal resource mix where the resources include inhouse counsel, outside counsel, contract lawyers, paralegals, automation, and offshore lawyers. What logic and good business practice could not force, perhaps economic crisis will. With luck, the economic crisis will also help break down lawyer caste mentality, though I don’t hold my breath on that.

The shift in thinking by both lawyers and the media does not surprise me. Beyond the passage of time, which helps the legal market digest all things new, the economic crisis has forced corporations to reduce costs. Legal outsourcing is a lower cost resource for a range of work GCs must do.

[This was adapted from my Legal Media Shift on Outsourcing? at the Integreon blog.]

Last week top law firm O’Melveny and information retrieval firm H5 announced an alliance to provide clients with innovative search methods for electronic document discovery (EDD). This is a legal market watershed in my view. I was fortunate to interview Richard Goetz, Chair of O’Melveny’s Class Actions practice group about this agreement and the firm’s thinking behind it. 

On 3 August 2009, the two organizations issued the press release O’Melveny and H5 Form Strategic Alliance to Offer Cutting-Edge Model for Document Review. I understand why blogosphere and Twitter chatter about this was limited. E-discovery software vendors and service providers sometimes persuade law firms to issue press releases announcing the use of their products or services. These releases are about the vendor, not the firm. As far as I can tell, only Law.com’s Legal Technology Blog noticed something different here, observing the firm likely sees competitive advantage in the announcement.

I agree and go further. Unlike the typical press release announcing partnerships with e-discovery software vendors or service providers, O’Melveny stakes out a clear position: it wants to provide “clients with a cost-effective, efficient and accurate alternative to traditional search methods for document discovery, review and analysis.” The release quotes Goetz acknowledging client concern about the cost of e-discovery and document review. Everyone in the legal market knows this is true but few BigLaw firms say so; fewer still take public steps to address the problem. So I was pleased be able to learn more by speaking with Mr. Goetz.

Goetz explained that the firm started an initiative several months ago to identify a means to help address what the firm knew was urgent client concern about the spiraling cost of document review. O’Melveny spoke to clients about the problem and sought potential solutions. The firm put aside any consideration of their own economics and legacy approach. After evaluating options, they chose H5.

I asked Goetz if the firm conducted a competitive analysis of how other firms handle EDD, mentioning Dorsey & Whitney’s LegalMine offering (my blog post about LegalMine here). O’Melveny did not consider how other law firms handle doc review; rather, the firm wanted to figure out the problem from a client perspective. Their idea was to solve the problem by offering a completely different model. So the diligence was on e-discovery providers and Goetz says the firm spent much time looking at available technology and process before reaching out to H5.

So will it work? I have long been impressed with H5 technology and process and have mentioned the company in several posts over the years. So I have no doubt that H5 is a good approach. The question is really better stated as, “will lawyers adopt this new way of working?”

In my two decades of legal technology experience, I know that it’s one thing to come up with an innovative approach, another to sell it inside a law firm. Goetz says that O’Melveny focuses on what clients need and the rest flows from that. The firm will not require partners to use H5 and will still offer traditional doc review approaches for those clients who want it. But Goetz reports that in internal discussions, partners are very receptive to the idea of a better way and recognize the importance of offering desperate (my word, not his) GCs an alternative. One internal selling point was the potential to get litigation matters that the firm might not otherwise get.

I pressed him on the internal pitch, pointing out that many firms profit hugely from staff or contract attorneys and consequently don’t want to disturb the model. Goetz’s view is that if you want to be a leading law firm and litigation powerhouse, you cannot ask how to keep high margins. Instead, you have to ask how to deliver the best service for clients and solve problems in the best manner possible, at the best cost.

I agree - this point seems obvious yet sorely missing at many firms. When I was a law firm manager discussing client service issues, I often said - to partners and to staff - let’s have this discussion as if the GC of our biggest client were in the room. He or she does not necessarily have to agree with everything we say but should not be embarrassed, appalled, or angry at anything we say. I have heard many a discussion in BigLaw about attorney review that fails this simple test.

I wonder though, if in breaking the mold, O’Melveny has created yet higher expectations for itself. After all, many other methods exist to control and reduce litigation cost. Two of my favorites are budgets (based on rigorous analysis of aggregated data from prior matters) and risk analysis using decisions trees. So I asked Goetz if clients may now expect O’Melveny to announce additional cost control measures. Goetz hopes so. He agrees that more rigorous budgeting is a good candidate. Plus he thinks a really big opportunity is better collaboration with in-house counsel to make business-based risk decisions about litigation.

The jury is, as they say, still out. It will be interesting to watch O’Melveny and H5 to see if either discusses their future joint experience, especially cost savings they achieve. Irrespective of outcome, however, I view this partnership as a great step forward for the market. Goetz talked about gaining the “first mover” advantage - words seldom heard in BigLaw. O’Melveny may very well gain the benefits accruing to a first mover. Moreover, with luck, the entire market will benefit: the firm’s move may force the rest of BigLaw to talk about the elephant in the litigation room in new terms.

The three InnovAction Awards for 2009 have been announced. 

InnovAction is a program of the College of Law Practice of Management. I am a trustee of COLPM and a Friend of InnovAction but had no role in or access to the judging process.

COLPM and InnovAction focus on law practice management writ large; the awards are not targeted at any one dimension such as technology or marketing. (e.g., one past award was for a new type of office design.)

From the InnovAction website the winner and honorable mention award (new category) are:

New Family Organization: Family, Justice and Law initiative

Irit Rosenblum broke fresh ground defending a universal right to family as intrinsic to the practice of law. Rosenblum pioneered a new sphere of legal rights surrounding the family based on the conviction that the rights to marry, divorce, have children, bequeath and inherit assets, and conduct family life are human rights and must be attainable to all regardless of faith, nationality, sexual orientation or status. She founded New Family to fill a critical gap in the practice of law in Israel: to attain the right of every individual to establish a family and to exercise equal rights within it. For the 2 million people in Israel who are subject to discrimination due to family status, New Family’s achievements have been invaluable.

In addition, for the first time, the InnovAction Awards offered Honorable Mentions to entries that have taken an existing innovation in the practice of law, transformed it in a unique and valuable way, and made it better than before. (emphasis added)

Practical Law Company, Inc.: Creating Efficiency for business lawyers

Practical Law Company (PLC) is changing the way business lawyers work. It employ attorneys with significant experience practicing with the world’s leading law firms and legal departments (e.g. Davis Polk, Skadden, Pfizer, Sullivan & Cromwell) to provide practical, up-to-date resources that help business lawyers practice more efficiently and provide greater value to clients. PLC provides the practical, generic level of information needed by all business lawyers that allows them to get up to speed quickly, stop reinventing the wheel and focus on client and firm specific work. It launched its first US services in December 2008 to wide market acceptance. PLC began in the UK in 1990.

–

The five InnovAction judges were greatly impressed by the groundbreaking ideas in the submissions from law firms and companies in the United States, Canada, and the Middle East", said Jordan Furlong, editor of the Canadian Bar Association’s National magazine and chair of the 2009 awards program.

The world is rushing to embrace statistics. Not so lawyers. 

For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics (New York Times, 6 August 2009) explains the rise of statisticians. “In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore — sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more… Though at the fore, statisticians are only a small part of an army of experts using modern statistical techniques for data analysis.”

It’s not that lawyer and law firm managers have no data to analyze. I’ve frequently lamented the lack of statistics in e-discovery, a very good example of ‘new realms of data to explore’ . And whatever happened to business intelligence (BI) in law firm management. The last entry in my BI blog category was three years ago. Maybe firms and vendors stopped talking about BI, but I suspect it just never got the traction I expected.

I’d be curious to know the average number of semesters of college-level math studied by lawyers versus other professionals. I suspect therein lies the explanation.

I recently wrote about my My Current Personal Productivity Favorites. Now I turn to my technology productivity blackholes. 

For 18 months I felt like Comcast was my best friend based on how often I talked with them. Long story short: I suffered intermittent connectivity lapses that were only resolved when I persuaded Comcast to build another “node” to serve my home. That said, they always were courteous and tried to help and over the years, their customer service and QoS has improved.

I am also pals with Sprint Nextel, which has been my wireless carrier for 10+ years. Through various models of Palm Treos and now a Blackberry, I have had problems big and small. Again, customer service is generally pretty good though I occasionally get reps who are unfriendly or demonstrably don’t follow their training.

Yet one more connectivity sinkhole: flakiness in my 8x8 VOIP phone line. Moments of silence during calls, dial and other end never rings, cut-off in middle of calls.

Then there is Microsoft. Need I say more? With MS, I have to separate chronic and acute problems and separate errors of commission and omission. Examples, in text not as a graphic, from the consultant’s two-by-two matrix:

• Chronic / Omission: Crashing apps, too many examples to enumerate. Boot time. Inconsistency within and across apps (Software example: keystroke combo required “tab” among open files for Excel is “CTRL-TAB” but for Word is CTRL-F6. Hardware example: scroll wheel does not work in Windows File Explorer). Likely combination example: auto-dialer in Outlook sends pulses instead of tones to my phone with some regularity
• Chronic/Commission: intrusive updates
• Acute/Omission: time it takes to get a new PC up and running
• Acute/Commission: the ~40 hours I lost with MS phone support and on my own fixing a faulty update.

For all its fame and good reviews, I find that Mozilla Firefox crashes way too often. For me, at least 2x / week.

One ought to be able to use connectivity and software and rarely experience a problem. I hope that in my life time, I can look back to this moment and think “how quaint", just like I do about all the cars on the side of road in my childhood with flat tires, overheating, or other breakdowns.

The litigation support and e-discovery market has felt chaotic for years now: rapid growth, technological shifts, emerging judicial reviews, and changing roles of the the main players (law departments, vendors, and law firms). EDD SHOWCASE: Strange Times by George Socha & Tom Gelbmann (Law Technology News, August 2009) provides good market insight. 

For anyone in EDD land, this is a must read. My key take-aways:

• Law firms nationwide purport to harbor deep EDD expertise - much of this is a convenient fiction
• No more than 30 companies have deep EDD expertise; others struggle to build it
• The fear of EDD cost and risk drives the market; “seldom mentioned, is every litigator’s fundamental need to find the data necessary to tell a compelling tale…. Finding the right data and figuring out what to do with it should be primary drivers, yet all too often these considerations are not even part of the conversation.” [See my June post , E-Discovery Goal: Win or Avoid Disaster?]
• “Increasingly document review has become the purview of specialized review shops — some domestic, others partially or predominantly offshore.”
• Survey data show a 9% dollar contraction in EDD yet market participants expect growth around 25%. My take: volumes continue to grow; unit costs are shrinking (and will continue to do so); more reluctance to share data so results may not be as reliable; and costs are shifting to earlier in the EDRM cycle where measuring them is harder.
• “In a crowded, noisy market, too many providers are making unsubstantiated claims and creating consumer confusion, while consumers lack effective means to compare technologies and methods. ”

Is the legal profession unusual in its reliance on untested assumptions? 

I frequently point out that lawyers implicitly assume the human document review in e-discovery is reliable so I won’t beat that already dead horse. Corporate Counsel Are Reducing Ranks of Secondary Outside Firms, Survey Reports (NLJ, 20 July 2009) reports on a survey finding that general counsels “are using fewer law firms because short-staffed corporate legal departments have little time to manage outside firms, not just because consolidating work is cheaper.”

Why do we assume that law departments manage outside counsel? Do we have evidence this is true, other than claims that it happens? At the risk of playing semantics, I suggest that inhouse counsel don’t have time to administer so many outside firms. My impression is that inhouse lawyers rarely manage outside counsel. They focus instead on the substance and strategy of a matter, not its management. Further, they are often reluctant to “micro manage” their outside counsel.

Fine, prove me wrong. All the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen supports my view. I’ve talked to inhouse counsel about requiring, for example, their outside counsel to provide budgets, prepare decision trees, or require offshore document review. Typically, their answer is “I have limited bandwidth to deal with these issues and I have to pick my battles with outside counsel carefully.”

In my post Reducing Legal Costs Beyond Tinkering with Price (14 July 2009) I wrote “law departments must actually manage inside and outside counsel, looking at how lawyers perform their work and actively seeking more efficient and effective ways to practice.”

I don’t think the current structure of law departments supports real management. GCs who actually want to manage outside counsel likely need to create a new position, someone whose job is to manage. This would acknowledge that the status quo (pre- and post-crash) has inhouse lawyers focused on case strategy and tactics, which is fine. It would add a new layer responsible for real management.

Of course, this would be a new cost. But how could it not pay for itself? For any law department spending more than a few million dollars annually on outside counsel, it’s hard to believe that active management of firms wouldn’t more than pay for the additional salary.