Peer to Peer Magazine

Spring 2019

The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association

Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/1097368

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16 Lawyering in Your Sleep B Y J A S O N D I R K X A N D A M Y M O N A G H A N I n his 2008 book The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services, Richard Susskind predicted that packaged services (or productization) would enable lawyers to "mak[e] money while [they] sleep." That future is now and law firms are packaging their services into all kinds of legal products. But what solutions work well as legal products? What are the pitfalls? How do you even get started? For our purposes, we will consider a "legal product" to be any instance of attorneys and firms packaging knowledge and processes for commercial gain, including off-the-shelf products and hybrid product/service offerings. Our goal is to address the challenges and recommended practices around packaging legal services and to start a conversation with those who may be building legal products without categorizing their activities as such. While there are many more complex topics around packaging legal services (such as marketing, pricing and sales, attorney compensation and ethical considerations, among others), we will focus on the "why" of legal products and how to get started. Some mainstream examples of productized knowledge and services include: • TurboTax - takes rules of tax law and accounting practices and bundles them up into a package that serves the needs of a vast majority of consumers; • Rocket Mortgage - collects information from mortgage-seekers and initiates workflows that facilitate the mortgage process, combining technolo with human workflow interaction; • LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer - provide an array of legal services, ranging from automated documents such as wills and incorporation materials, to full-scale legal services. An Approach to Legal Product Development

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