Peer to Peer Magazine

inside ILTA "Disruption in Legal" was the theme for the fourth annual Lexthink.1 (formerly Ignite Law) "future of law practice" event, produced by InsideLegal and brainchild Matt Homann. The event served as the opening act of the ABA TECHSHOW, taking place the night before the conference kicked off in early April and hosted by the ABA Law Practice Management Section. To determine the agenda, we invited members of the legal community to submit topics to speak on, submissions were compiled, and the community voted on what interested them most (over 10,000 votes cast to date). The selected speakers each prepared a six-minute, rapid-fire presentation to share with a sold-out audience. 2013 was the year of the JDs, with eight of the 11 speakers having attained a law degree … although most of them consider themselves "recovering" attorneys (no longer practicing law, and running legal-focused technology and service companies). This year's LexThink.1 presentations were all about market disruption in our profession: creative and disruptive innovations and trends that have already taken hold, as well as concepts on the horizon that could impact the future dramatically. In order to get a better sense of what our speakers associated with market change, we asked them to name the biggest market disruption they had witnessed in legal. Answers included much of what we take for granted these days — the Internet, email, the cloud and the demise of paper — and more recent innovations, including the advent of electronically stored information (ESI) in e-discovery, the emergence of the virtual law practice, the potential of big data analytics and online legal services companies, which signify the end of traditional firm business models. 104 Peer to Peer Taking a closer look at the LexThink.1 2013 topics, there are some intriguing themes and takeaways: Online Legal Service Delivery: Avvo CEO, Mark Britton, focused his six-minute presentation on LegalZoom and how this business model is revolutionizing not only law practice but law firm marketing, branding, pricing, etc. He spoke of the power of offering low-level (i.e., easy to automate, execute and replicate) legal services and then pairing these with more sophisticated legal work. So, for example, if you use an online service to purchase documents and application forms for a Green Card, why not use the same resource to explore and apply for citizenship? The services are related, and the relationship has already been established. "Traditional" legal service providers might be well-served to embrace this approach and, as Matt Spiegel asked in his "Death of the Office" presentation, "Would you rather be Blockbuster or Netflix?" Learn how to transition out of traditional/offline service delivery to offering more for less, and faster via online options. Analytics and Big Data Mining for Benefit: Both Roe Frazer and Eric Hunter focused their topics on using data, information and analytics to make informed decisions related to law firm management. Eric, who speaks frequently on the opportunity of big data analytics for law firms, painted a "pie in the sky" picture of mining client data to serve clients better and streamline billing and pricing practices, while also warning that privacy, as it relates to tapping into mega data sets, is as touchy as ever. Roe Frazer advocates the use of technology in promoting "intelligent"

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