The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/11430
By 2020, however, we will see a number of firms that have thrown open the doors to their project management offices and applied the techniques that have let them manage IT so well to their own legal services. Indeed, we might expect IT executives to exert leadership influences outside of their traditional domains. They know valuable things. Law firm economics are now shifting so as to provide incentives for recognizing and fully utilizing such skills. Incentives are also increasing toward the use of process control and quality assurance. We have already seen at least one U.S. firm adopt elements of the Six Sigma discipline.5 2020, we can expect to see much more of that. Expanding the Service Platform As the decade continues and some law firms adopt staffing, project management, process control and quality assurance innovations from mainstream industry, we might expect them to expand their service offerings beyond traditional legal services. Indeed, we have already seen some of this as firms reposition IT services and, more recently, e-discovery services as stand-alone service organizations. We have already seen and can expect to see more of the “cost center” phenomenon that was especially evident in industry through the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, many businesses sought to convert cost centers within their companies into By revenue generating entities. Most efforts folded under their own weight because companies underestimated the resource and financial commitments necessary to turn an internal service organization into one that stands on its own. But then there were the exceptions. Foremost among those is what used to be known as Andersen Consulting and is now known as Accenture. It grew out of an internal IT consulting service and, after splitting with Arthur Andersen and Company in 1989, has grown to become one of the largest consulting organizations in the world. By 2020, we may well see a significant percentage of law firm revenues coming from nontraditional realms such as IT consulting, strategic consulting, e-discovery and due diligence services as well as other areas. Indeed, some firms are already very active in these areas. By the time of the split, Andersen Consulting’s per partner profitability far outstripped that of Andersen proper. Indeed, that was a factor in the split (as well as the liability that arose from Andersen’s audit activities). We see some firm e-discovery consulting arms already moving toward extraordinary profitability while, at the same time, radically lowering the cost of e-discovery and otherwise much improving service levels for clients. This is also true in other areas, such as legislative consulting. Firms that manage to create such entities either within or alongside their organizations will be in a much better position A Law2020 Case Study: The E-Discovery Quagmire Over the course of the LAW2020TM initiative, we will examine many technological and business opportunities and undertake several case studies in an effort to parse the challenges of the next decade. First, we’ll look at a problem that law firm clients regard as most pressing, and then we’ll look at how innovative technologies and transformative business models might address the problem. Law firms that will thrive through the next decade are already undertaking such analyses themselves. he cost of document discovery in litigation has become a leading target for complaints by global businesses, and the costs of e-discovery in the United States are regarded as having reached critical levels — levels at which something must be done. A short excursion into the numbers associated with such discovery reveals the cause of this alarm. T A Woeful Tale Let’s assume that a company senior executive — call him Smithers — is a central figure in a business dispute. Smithers is a modern man who conducts much of his 48 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer business in his e-mail inbox. As a consequence, he has accumulated a good deal of e-mail (and his company, Springfield NPP, Inc., does nothing to limit e-mail retention). Let’s say that Smithers has accumulated 20 gigabytes of messages (an astounding quantity, but one that is increasingly common). Because he is broadly connected to the central dispute, all his messages are theoretically subject to initial document review. It is therefore collected in electronic form and reviewed in the usual way, which entails on-screen review. The process, however, demonstrates little to no improvement over the review processes common when discovery was a paper merchant’s dream. We might expect his e-mail repository to contain on the order of, say, 800,000 discrete documents. Put those