P2P

67 I L T A N E T . O R G A mara's Law — as summed up most famously by Bill Gates — tells us that we tend to overestimate the change that will happen in the next two years but underestimate the change that will happen in the next ten. 2020 put these words to the test. As the global pandemic applied sudden and intense pressure on the business environment, the legal industry challenged age- old critiques about its unwillingness and/or inability to change. As the entire world mobilized rapidly to create a new fundamentally digital paradigm, legal teams all over the world exceeded expectations in adapting to remote work. While the "future of work" has long remained a conceptual discussion, we have unique opportunities right now to shape the next step change for work and life in very concrete ways. This is doubly true within the legal industry. The best performing law firms aren't wondering how to "get back to normal"— they're actively rethinking long-held assumptions about the practice and business of law to architect and engineer new and enduring competitive advantages. Amidst the Fourth Industrial Revolution, many of those competitive advantages derive from technology. In Part 1 of this article, we identified four priorities for the CIO's strategic agenda: Evolving enterprise environment for law firm operations and management Practitioner toolbox for modern legal practice (lawyers and paraprofessional as users) Builder toolbox to digitize services (clients as end users and a multidisciplinary team of makers that includes lawyers) Tech as key enabler or constraint in service and business model transformation, practice by practice In this Part 2, we take a deeper dive into five critical success factors for the strategic CIO, with commentary and advice from seasoned innovators and business leaders across the industry. Customer Orientation: Listen To Your Users It may not seem this way to most lawyers, but we are already living in the era of the bionic organization, where human expertise and artificial intelligence meld together to form new value propositions with completely different cost structures and unprecedented potential for scale. This means law firm CIOs have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate actively in the organization's long-range Editor's note: In Part 1 of this series, Brad and Jae exchanged thoughts in an informal dialogue on the most pressing priorities for law firm CIOs in a post-Covid market. In Part 2, they provide a roadmap on how CIOs can lead within their organizations to successfully navigate an increasingly complex legal market in the digital era. 1 2 3 4

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