Peer to Peer Magazine

WWW.ILTANET.ORG 71 executive table on a regular basis. Horizon scanning of emerging developments, technologies and competitor actions is largely automated and is used to inform the firm's long-term strategic planning. For these successful firms, the leadership imperative is pursue process excellence. In an era of commoditization, intense scrutiny and rising client service expectation, process excellence is essential. This means maintaining a ruthless focus on operational quality, efficiency, transparency and cost control, with IT as a key enabler. IT. They are highly IT-literate, and this is seen as a powerful source of competitive advantage and differentiation. A high level of experimentation and innovation is characteristic of the firm's culture, and clients see it as a first port-of-call to try out new approaches and ideas. The philosophy toward experiments, pilots and prototypes is to "fail fast and cheaply." New technologies and ideas are tested quickly by developing proofs of concept and seeing if there is value in them either in a client context or for internal applications. Artificial intelligence has been embraced across a wide range of client- facing and internal applications and has helped the firm develop a set of distinctive offerings in the marketplace. There is a focus on long-term portfolio planning with a shift of services and products across the spectrum from premium to commodity and, eventually, to free delivery. There is ongoing experimentation with pricing models. The firm provides smart metrics and analysis tools that allow clients and the firm to monitor performance and explore the impact of alternative pricing scenarios. Lawyers are support by a sophisticated suite of intelligent knowledge capture, analysis and interpretation tools that provide proactive, integrated, relevant and up-to-date synthesis of key client- and matter-related information. The notion of R&D is embraced, and the firm regularly partners with innovators looking to bring disruptive developments to the legal sector. The firm has built a strong reputation for delivery of effective and innovative business solutions and has close alignment to key client-facing practice areas. Firm leadership has a solid and continually updated understanding of how to create new opportunities and values. Stakeholders pursue systematic innovation across the firm and bring new opportunities to the PROCESS RE-ENGINEERING Internally, the goal of accelerating flow will drive the desire for seamless platforms offering integration across all applications. These will enhance speed of response and enable the rapid refinement and addition of services and offerings. Smart workflow automation, content processing and analysis should help eradicate human error, reduce costs and drive learning that enables continuous process refinement. With clients and judges alike demanding faster turnaround of information, speed will be a major driver for many applications and processes. The focus will be on key tasks such as de-duplicating data quickly, enabling rapid early content codification, speeding up case assessment, shortening the time to file a motion and accelerating analysis and response cycles. Detailed workflow analysis will allow firms to break a process down to its component tasks and assign each one to the least expensive person who is capable of handling it. We must take a process- and project-management approach to all work undertaken. Workflows must be streamlined, broken down to discrete tasks to be allocated to the lowest cost resource that can complete them — a lawyer, outsourced service partner or intelligent system. This will accelerate the commoditization of many tasks and could reshape the legal value chain as more low value tasks are parceled out to external providers. This will drive the firm to focus on developing new value-adding services. BUSINESS INNOVATORS As we imagine the successful law firm of the future, we see the business innovators have transformed their relationships with clients through the effective use of About the Study A forward-looking global study exploring how advances in information technology (IT) could impact the legal profession over the next decade was undertaken during 2013 by Fast Future Research at the behest of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA). The study used a combination of desk research, interviews, workshops and two global surveys — one explored the business applications of IT in the legal sector, and the other provided input to create an emerging technology timeline. The resulting report, Legal Technology Future Horizons, provides the critical findings and implications emerging from the study. Download the full report at www.iltanet.org/ltfh. LEGAL TECHNOLOGY FUTURE HORIZONS LEADER'S DIGEST view the leader's digest and learn more about the study at iltanet.org/ltfh

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