The Great Legal Reformation
The Great Legal Reformation

The Great Legal Reformation

the legal profession will be unable to cope with an onslaught of new competitors, many of whom are not lawyers; that the profession’s love affair with precedent, combined with risk aversion and an unwillingness to be a first mover, will form a deadly cocktail for many. (Location 69)

Tags: lawyers

Note: .lawyers lawyers are too risk averse, focused on precedent and slow to change.

PART ONE THE ENABLING POWER OF LEGISLATIVE CHANGE or HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE MY NEW STRUCTURE

CHAPTER 1 SLATER AND GORDON

Australia’s regulatory regime: one that permits law firms to be owned and operated by persons without legal training. A regime that allows law firms to be publicly traded on the Australian Securities Exchange, giving the average Aussie a piece of the legal meat pie. (Location 250)

Tags: australia

Note: .australia anyone can own a law firm in Australia

legal services is miles behind where other service industries are now, and we can bring in people who have gone through similar changes in those industries, such as banking, financing, insurance, or telecommunications, there’s a lot we can learn from them. The experience and insight from other consumer-facing industries is invaluable.” (Location 378)

Tags: legalindustry

Note: .legalindustry the legal industry is far behind most service sectors. CEO of Slaters australia

CHAPTER 2 THE SALVOS

CHAPTER 3 RIVERVIEW LAW

when the cost of outside law firms became too high, clients began building their in-house legal teams as a cost-saving measure. This amazed Karl. “What kind of a supply chain makes it cheaper for the customer to do the work itself? The legal supply chain is a mess! (Location 881)

Tags: insourcing, legal

Note: .legal .insourcing

There is no shortage of quality legal services in the UK, (or in most other first-world countries for that matter) which can make it hard for clients to differentiate among firms. As a result, law firms tend to be selected based on a “relationship” with a certain lawyer; likeability therefore becomes the differentiator. This “relationship factor,” however, reinforces to clients the value of the individual lawyer rather than the value of the team as a whole. It makes the client more portable, which is good for the lawyer, but not so good for the firm. (Location 895)

the best way to do that, the executive team believed, was through the creation of “a complete legal operations platform, a complete end-to-end manager for any legal work type.” Named KIM, this platform combines artificial intelligence, workflow, process, management information and reporting, all on a “no-code” configurable platform; it sends complicated matters to the right legal person, and allows business teams to self-serve on less complicated matters., (Location 946)

Tags: kim, riverview

Note: .riverview .kim

CHAPTER 4 RADIANT LAW

For most law firms, IT is about getting a computer in someone’s hands, and worrying a lot about security. Security is an all-consuming topic at law firms—that, and time-keeping systems—not innovation.” (Location 1002)

Tags: it

Note: .it

Tasks within each file were assessed for risk and volume. Those bits that were low risk and high volume were outsourced. “We started with Pangea3 in India to do the junior work,” (Location 1019)

Tags: ms

Note: .ms review each item for risk, and outsource the lower risk items

Alex charged his team of about 30 (lawyers, developers, project managers and the like—82 percent of which are women) to sort out the best way to allocate work among themselves. Their solution? Pool all the work and let people self-regulate. As matters come in, “the team just jumps on them and now we’ve built a workflow system around that. (Location 1053)

Tags: radiantlaw

Note: .radiantlaw

CHAPTER 5 INVICTA LAW

PART TWO PROCESS, PROCESS, PROCESS

CHAPTER 6 HUNOVAL LAW

“As a small firm, we could have just been another average law firm going the general practice route. Instead, I decided to maniacally and singularly focus on a small area and be the very best at it: real estate.” (Location 1316)

As all good technology consultants know, process is the foundation of any technology project. “You can’t create a technology solution until you understand what process you’re trying to enable,” (Location 1322)

Tags: process

Note: .process understand the process before bringing in the tech

“It’s actually not very hard to complete a project and see immediate results,” Kevin told me. “The hard part is sustaining results. To do that, you need to constantly monitor and track the system, and have someone continually driving change. If Matt had gone with an outsourced approach to managing Lean Six Sigma, it’s very likely that the initial success would have deteriorated. The old processes and ways of doing things would have eventually returned by sheer institutional inertia.” (Location 1358)

Tags: businesschange

Note: .businesschange sustaining change is the hard part.

Each fiscal quarter, five Hunoval team members take the Green Belt Lean Six Sigma class at CLLES. The class runs all day, every Friday for five consecutive weeks. And while students are not required to make up any lost time from work, they are required to pass an examination at the end of the course. Once they’re fully grounded in the Lean Six Sigma theories taught at CLLES, students return to the firm to come up with a process improvement project for their area of work. This typically involves mapping all the steps of a process in which they’re involved, determining “pain points,” or things they wish they could change to make the process run smoother or faster, then spending the next 60 days implementing a solution. (Location 1377)

Tags: leansixsigma

Note: .leansixsigma employees train every friday for five weeks

There will be litigation lawyers who point out that acting more efficiently hurts them in the pocketbook. But the other side of the coin is that efficient lawyers who close more cases should theoretically get more cases and those lawyers will simply charge for their work in a different way. As one litigator told me, “It’s just a pricing dynamic.” (Location 1407)

Tags: pricing

Note: .pricing if youre more efficient youll close cases faster and need to charge differently

CHAPTER 7 SEYFARTH SHAW

Partner-resistance in an industry where lateral movement between law firms is common remains a serious hurdle; unhappy partners often take themselves, their clients, and even their teams across the street to a competitor with little effort. (Location 1526)

Tags: lawfirms

Note: .lawfirms partners can easily move teams nd xlients to another firm

the example of a lawyer sending a well-crafted memo to her client only to receive the response, “Thanks, but that memo didn’t really help me.” (Location 1611)

Process improvement never ends; it needs to be continually nurtured and incorporated into the psyche of employees by strong champions throughout the firm—especially at the highest levels. (Location 1700)

Tags: champions

Note: .champions

CHAPTER 8 VALOREM LAW GROUP

The turning point came in 2007 when Patrick happened to meet President John F. Kennedy’s special advisor and speechwriter, Ted Sorenson. Upon hearing Patrick’s concerns, Sorenson gave him some sage advice: “You need to decide if you want to spend energy getting your firm to move toward the space you want to be in. Or whether you want to be in the space you want to be in.” (Location 1781)

Tags: change

Note: .change

PART THREE A POTPOURRI OF ALTERNATIVE TRAILBLAZERS IN VIGNETTE FORM

CHAPTER 9 gunnercooke

“What happens to a decent person who is forced to work long hours at a job she doesn’t like, in conditions she cannot control, for clients who don’t express appreciation or even acknowledge her existence?” (Location 1860)

Tags: lawyers

Note: .lawyers

Darryl spoke to a number of chief executive officers at large- and mid-sized companies, asking them what they disliked most about their lawyers. Their answers all seemed to be remarkably consistent: (i) having to use inexperienced, junior lawyers; (ii) uncertainty of fees; and (iii) a lack of commercial thinking. (Location 1870)

Tags: lawyers

Note: Clients want high quality, price certainty and as cheap as is reasonable.

gunnercooke’s secret sauce is deceptively simple: take away the friction points of a traditional law firm; bolster lawyer autonomy and freedom; invest in methods that make lawyers happy; actively help lawyers become successful— all fully supported by existing technology that permits optimized, flexible and dispersed operations. (Location 1972)

CHAPTER 10 INKSTERS

CHAPTER 11 NOMADIC LAWYERS

Sometimes an outsider’s perspective is what’s needed to change the structure and operations of entities that provide legal services. (Location 2074)

Tags: legal innovation consulting

Each lawyer signs an agreement with LOD for each engagement where, among other things, the parties agree upon the weekly or daily rate to be paid to the lawyer. Like at Obelisk, LOD lawyers freely choose the files they want to work on. (Location 2157)

Tags: nomadiclawyers

Note: .nomadiclawyers

“Firms prefer to use us on transactional work so they can scale quickly,” Simon said. “They often ask us to build a team for some of the lower-level, routine work, so their associates can do the higher-value work.” Using LOD allows law firms to reduce the cost of having a standing army of expensive associates. (Location 2164)

Tags: nomadiclawyers

Note: .nomadiclawyers

When I asked Simon if the market is getting crowded with the likes of other London firms such as Pinsent Masons and Allen & Overy creating their own nomadic lawyer networks, he was nonplussed. “The more organizations there are, the more it adds credibility to the model and the more it assists with normalizing clients to it. With more credibility and more normalization comes a new mentality. Soon we won’t be seen as alternative legal providers—we’ll just be part of the landscape.” (Location 2174)

Tags: nomadiclawyers

Note: .nomadiclawyers

PART FOUR CONCLUSIONS

CHAPTER 12 WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

significant and consistent, long-term investment in client-centred service innovation (via technology or new processes) that creates unique client experiences. (Location 2228)

the GLR will force many legal service providers to view legal services as a team sport, where lawyers will simply be specialists, filling gaps that can’t otherwise be addressed by technology and workflow. Team members without legal training won’t do what lawyers do, and the lawyers won’t do what other team members do; however, neither group will find success alone. (Location 2247)

Mark Cohen, More Essays on Legal Delivery (Legal Business World, 2017) (Location 2288)

Tags: btr

Note: .btr

Mary Lacity, Leslie Willcocks and Andrew Burgess The Rise of Legal Services Outsourcing: Risk and Opportunity, (Bloomsbury, 2015) (Location 2293)

Tags: btr

Note: .btr

The Law Society of England and Wales, Capturing Technological Innovation in Legal Services, 2017 (Location 2323)

Tags: atr

Note: .atr