P2P

72 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 Both Shaver and Factor's Sohn stress that the new competitive realities of the legal market offer hidden opportunities for those willing to look with fresh eyes. Prevailing narratives around the many insurgent forces in the legal market are often pithy and convenient but also reductive. Are ALSPs and legal tech companies simply barbarians at the gate waiting to eat Big Law's lunch? We think the reality is more complicated. And better. The law firm model originated as a vehicle to house specialized expertise. Current market forces are stretching that model to the point of breaking, and it is critical for law firms to evolve and expand. But the HOW of that evolution doesn't mean that law firms have to go to war with everyone. CIOs who can leverage strategic partnerships outside the firm can field a stronger and more diverse team to tackle broader and more strategic briefs with greater confidence. They can do it faster, too. Buy-To-Build: Not Your Father's Buy Vs. Build Business Case In an extreme example of such a mandate, a few law firms are shifting portions of their services business to a product-centric business model. We see exponential growth among low-code platforms as law firms experiment with the productization of legal expertise and automation of legal workflows. For some firms, this will mean building lightweight apps to facilitate back-office operations. Others are investing serious time, effort, and money into market- or client-facing products – which require a paradigm shift in thinking about technology and revenue models. This naturally raises questions about how the CIO can best enable these efforts. To help make sense of the low- code trend and tease out some of the implications, we turned to Rob Saccone, a seasoned legal tech entrepreneur and market expert: "Low-code platforms reduce the build time for software and shift the skills required to less expensive resources. Practically speaking, however, there is no zero-cost software, so what's needed is planning for new risks and accounting properly for new categories of costs." Whether it's a good idea for law firms to reimagine themselves as technolog y companies is questionable, but either way we agree with Saccone that the endeavor should be undertaken with a high level of financial rigor in measuring the size of the prize, the total investments implied and the expected return to the partnership. ( Just like any new business initiative.) We we believe the law firm structure, however, requires specialized attention to a governance framework that helps the firm manage the entire portfolio of innovation projects. "The new competitive realities of the legal market offer hidden opportunities for those willing to look with fresh eyes." E X T R A S

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