Peer to Peer Magazine

20 T he carnage of the Great Recession was still fresh when we conceived ILTA's Law2020 initiative. I remember how it started. Attendees at ILTACON 2009 seemed stunned at how rapidly the legal market had flipped from a seller's paradise to…something else completely. Just a year or so prior, we'd had the most profitable year in the history of the profession, capping a decade and a half of rich rate increases, one after another. Yes, law industry observers had been noting rising dissatisfaction from GCs about BigLaw's lack of innovation and Microsoft-like margins. But, that was just talk. Then, the sky fell. Suddenly, law departments were in total control, exercising newfound muscle over the legal services market. Who knew they had it? In an unprecedented power move, the Association of Corporate Counsel created its Value Challenge and Value Index of law firms. The largest financial institutions were shopping portfolios of thousands of foreclosure cases, and forcing bargain basement fixed pricing. AFAs were everywhere. And no one knew on the law firm side what to make of any of it. As we wrapped up the 2009 conference, we realized that we needed to do a lot more more to prepare our members for the tumult of the decade to come. The future of law was at hand, and it was playing rough. Our B Y J O H N A L B E R members needed tools and techniques to understand and manage that future. From that realization, Law2020 was born. In a wonderful demonstration of peer power, ILTA turned on a dime, pulled out all the volunteer stops and launched the initiative in the June 2010 Peer to Peer. That issue proved to be the largest in ILTA's history. Law2020 exploded off the launch pad with a burst of thinking (including from ILTA's current CEO) about what the coming decade would bring…indeed, from the law firm perspective, what it should bring. Our authors were not just descriptive, but prescriptive as well. I joined many other authors in assessing what skills we would need to thrive over the next ten years. I also joined in the hope that law firms would heed our clients' requests for innovation, and offered a dim assessment of the chances that many firms would actually do so. Looking back on the list of topics that we covered in those articles, I am proud of two things. First, we were prescient in terms of the skills clients would begin demanding from their law firms. For example, in that kickoff issue, we spoke of the need to master: • Alternate Fee Arrangements • Business process improvement • Legal project management • New age litigation support • Data-driven decision making • Quality assurance • Alternative staffing • Alternative and virtual offices • The cost/value calculus • Client centricity, and • Practice mobility (to accommodate a changing workforce) Second, we anticipated, without naming it, the rise of legal operations. Remember, at the time of our Law2020 kick-off, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) had not yet been formed. It started as a small, informal discussion group later that year. But, by that time, ILTA was already Law2020?—OMG! It's 2020! How ILTA Prepared You for the Future

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