P2P

69 I L T A N E T . O R G We tend to agree with Sohn. Allied professionals like project managers are often power users and enabling champions. Many law firms achieve quicker tech adoption in their captive ALSPs, which are fit-for-purpose centers of excellence around a specific practice area, like transactions, litigation, and contracting. As legal supply chains become more diverse, more law firms are also open to partnering with outside ALSPs to secure tranches of work that require technology enablement. These variations in service models offer interesting opportunities for CIOs to think creatively about adoption in ways that weren't available ten or even five years ago, lending new importance to the age-old imperative to know your users. Data Focus: One Of Many Endgames For Cloud And Ai Tooling It's been 15 years since someone first said that "data is the new oil." Like oil, data has the potential to be valuable but remains useless if unrefined. Perennially data-rich but insight poor, most legal teams are still unable to extract meaning from even small data sets. What's an enterprising CIO to do? Despite all the sexy hype around data science, unravelling the data conundrum likely requires organizational alignment around a pair of historically unsexy IT topics: infrastructure and process. The legal industry's journey to the cloud has been slow for good reasons: the stakes around data security couldn't be higher, while developing and deploying a governance framework that survives contact with reality remains a complex endeavor. Every CIO in Big Law faces a unique set of cultural, organizational, and technical constraints, and each will need to manage the when and the how of their organization's unique path to cloud readiness. One key to accelerate the organization's journey to the cloud is to create excitement around the destination. Cloud infrastructure underpins so many critical imperatives for the law firm of the future, but access to next-level analytics capabilities is a pretty compelling story to tell any executive committee. For now, the technology edge belongs to legal teams that can buy – and use – the best available tooling in an increasingly crowded legal tech marketplace. We are living through a Cambrian explosion in the growth and diversification of legal tech with creation and proliferation of entirely new categories, many of which delve much deeper into specific areas of legal practice. AI-based diligence for M&A will be market standard within the decade, and we see more and more technology applications that are tightly coupled to very specific legal workflows in specialized practices across capital markets, securities, trademarks and patents, among others. A critical second-order implication of the expanding practitioner toolbox is that many of these tools offer the ability to capture even more data that can generate even more new insights about legal risks and decision-making. The flip side is that many of these tools also create net-new security and governance risks by establishing more data silos, often beyond the CIO's sphere of control. Process discipline offers an obvious response to these problems, but most law firms operate under heavy process debt. Adding more process in isolated improvement projects can often add sufficient friction and drag to the firm's operating model – and still leave the organization without access to meaningful data-driven insights. To get a sense of how some of the most prestigious global law firms are approaching these challenges, we talked to Christian Lang, head of strategy at Reynen Court, a next-generation infrastructure and marketplace platform for cloud-based technologies backed by a consortium that includes the likes of Clifford Chance, Latham & Watkins, Paul Weiss, Davis Polk, Cravath, Freshfields, and Linklaters.

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