Peer to Peer Magazine

65 WWW.ILTANET.ORG Finding the Compass in Legal Technology FROM THE FUTURIST JOHN ALBER John Alber is retired and currently living aboard the 50-foot trawler Barefoot Lady in southern and southeastern U.S. waters. John also serves in a volunteer capacity as a futurist for the International Legal Technology Association. For the 16 years prior, he served as Bryan Cave's strategic innovation partner. The groups under his leadership developed innovative web-based, client-centric applications and client-facing knowledge management, project management, project estimation and business intelligence systems. Contact John at john@johnalber.com. The Legal Compass To keep from geing lost in the midst of all these changes, look up from all your technology and check your legal services model compass to help you chart your course. Clients have been telling lawyers for years about the abysmal nature of their service model –– a fact highlighted by Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) surveys that year aer year reveal that lawyers are difficult to reach and are unresponsive. Altman Weil, BTI Consulting and others capture the repeated complaint that lawyers do not trouble themselves to learn their clients' businesses. Worse is that only a small fraction of chief legal officers surveyed by the ACC believe firms are willing to change their service models. But lawyers just keep on keeping on. These conditions have led to an unprecedented level of activism by law departments. The rise of legal operations functions, the introduction of procurement disciplines into the acquisition of legal services, the formation of groups like the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, the creation of the ACC Value Challenge and extraordinary pushback on pricing and staffing decisions have all been dramatic responses to these perceived shortcomings. What are lawyers doing in response to this vocal complaining? Raising prices. According to Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor, the standard rate has risen to just under $500 in 2016 from $386 in 2007. Defining the Opportunity These market conditions have created the growth industry called "New Law." Services such as Rocket Lawyer and LegalZoom are turning automated document assembly and online decision trees into an entirely new infrastructure for the delivery of legal services. While those companies started out in the consumer sphere, they are now encroaching on valuable small and midsize business markets. Legal process outsourcers (LPOs) have transformed the economics of ediscovery, cuing Big Law out of very profitable revenue streams. Virtual entities such as Axiom, Counsel on Call and VLP are reformulating what it means to be a law firm. Blockchain-based companies are actively developing smart contract solutions in the financial and consumer goods sectors that cut lawyers out of the equation. Alternate dispute resolution services are springing up to remedy the cost, delay and unfairness inherent in an overloaded court system. All of this is just a beginning. Clients are lining up to use AI to further erode Big Law's hold on premium legal services. The Needle Which brings us to finding your compass in legal technology. That compass needle points the way toward making all of your technology choices relevant. Using your compass as your guide, you can shi from making technology purchasing decisions to identifying areas where leveraging technology can affect the service model the most. That is where you need to invest. We are inundated with the latest technology but still running into the same old hazards. It is time to look up from the technology and use your compass to get your eyes on the world. P2P Still a little fuzzy on how to read the compass needle? A discipline like design thinking is tailor-made to help you identify those areas of the service model that most need help. See more on design thinking on page 50.

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