Call to Action

Summary of Professor’s Susskind’s Points in his book

“The End of Lawyers”

Starting Point needs to change to: “What do Clients Need?”

This should be the starting question, which is more crucial as current technologies continue to disrupt current patterns of consumption.  Lawyers, as a unique breed within the service industry, seldom ask what the client needs – we tend to do things as they have been done, through tradition.  However, to cope with the fast changing world right now, this is a critical question, and a starting point for responding.

Clients:

  • Need our “knowledge”- in particular, structured, not haphazard
  • DO NOT need one on one interaction per se
  • Find us too reactive: they don’t want problem solving, they want to PREVENT the problem in the first place “legal risk management”
  • Want more for less: less expensive, better knowledge, better service

Technology’s Role and 10 disruptive legal technologies to watch for:

IT in legal world has two related impacts:

AUTOMATION – doing current things more efficiently

INNOVATION – different way of doing things, new way of delivering service

Lawyers, to the extent that they do, are focusing on the first, but the real impact will be via the second.

The Ten Disruptive Technologies:

  • Closed client communities
  • Sharing of knowledge peer to peer
  • Online dispute resolution
  • Embedded legal knowledge into processes (eg legal compliance built into current systems)
  • E-legal market place (e-surance, price comparison)
  • Expert vs. routine work: new ways of outsourcing the routine
  • Access to law will change from the traditional Rolls Royce, one on one model via:
  • Document assembly
  • Online legal advice
  • Open sourcing of legal materials
  • Communities of experience
  • FAQs, flow charts, decision trees

How should individual lawyers change?  We should learn from medical and other fields already learning to cope with changes.

  • Outsource the routine
  • Deliver service through the internet
  • Focus on issues that need deep expertise, complex communication
  • Notice that in all areas direct contact will decrease
  • Learn hybrid, multidisciplinary skills:
    • legal project manager
    • legal risk manager

How should the law business change?

Continue to increase efficiency through automation, but more importantly, through innovation.  We do much routine/repetitive legal work repeatedly, and at high costs. Let’s think about new ways to be efficient, and perhaps thinking about the ways that clients can collectively share the costs so that cost per transaction decreases.

Legal practice will have to transform, catch up with IT, and think about business possibilities: i.e. Online communities, IM, blogging, mass collaboration, social networking, twitter, and virtual pets.

Think of legal service like assembly line.  Perform multi-sourcing; farm each task out to most efficient source, including IT. (Note: “The Singularity is Near” predicts that by 2020, average desktop machine will have processing power of human brain, by 2050 more than all of humanity).

Some possible business models follows, ranging in a spectrum from traditional one on one, high transaction cost, to full commoditization, off the shelf, low cost.

Customized solutions (one-on-one traditional way of doing law)

Standardized solutions, for example:

  • Process- checklist, manuals, methodologies, pre-articulate the steps
  • Substance- templates, standard form documents, precedents
  • Systemization- more automatic standardization
  • Automatic document (answer a series of questions on software)
  • Automatic workflow

Package knowledge

Provide software to clients, via license, eg tax software by Deloitte

Full commoditization of the practice:

  • Remembering that law information, creating an ‘information world’ online service
  • Creating more open competition: more than one law firm offering service in one marketplace

Advantages as we move this listed spectrum:

  • Note marginal costs of delivery reduce
  • Easier to fixed fee, hourly billing not attractive to clients
  • Cheaper
  • Quality

Call to Action:  If you want to adapt to the demands of the 21st Century described here, and would like to join a peer advisory group dedicated to helping you adapt to the changes in the practice of law, confirm your interest by emailing George Bellas (george@bellas-wachowski.com) and by expressing your interest in the Attorneys Creative Roundtable (www.attorneyscreativeroundtable.com).  This group has been helping lawyers change and adapt to the demands of the 21st Century.

This process works. Participants have dramatically changed their practices and their business practices. I encourage you to join us. For more information, please contact me:

George Bellas
ACR Founder and Organizer
847-823-9030 x219
george@bellas-wachowski.com