Peer to Peer Magazine

59 WWW.ILTANET.ORG Luddites or Empaths FROM THE FUTURIST the competition that will inevitably ensue in the legal marketplace. The Rocket Lawyers and Axioms of the world are already challenging the flip phone standards that prevail in the delivery of legal services, but it remains to be seen who can achieve an empathic legal practice equivalent of the iPhone. To be sure, though, that achievement will be designed in the most active sense of the word. It won't be le to accident. Stepping into the Cycle So how do you prepare yourself to deliver "Easy Buons" into your own practice? The temptation is to think of it as an easy thing. As we oen hear, all that must happen is for this IT professional or that KM expert to be given "a seat at the table" and a bit of a budget and everything will work out fine. That is, all that has to happen is for lawyers to somehow acquire newfound respect for IT or KM staff, and "Easy Buons" will spring up everywhere. But that's a lile like expecting Apple to have gone out and asked whether customers actually wanted iPhones. What Apple did instead was to get deeply inside the psyches of their customers and understand their needs, which went far beyond their articulated desires. Apple didn't create the iPhone in one fell swoop. It created several portable antecedents, beginning with the earliest touchscreen devices, such as the Newton MessagePad PDA. Through close work with customers using successive devices such as the iPod and the Rokr cell phone, they dove deeper and deeper into the psyches of customers. Only then was the iPhone even possible, and it was perfected only aer several prototypes and early production models. This design cycle operates just as well in law firms. Much of my focus in law has been on the delivery of law firm and client business intelligence. Entry into that field was not a conventional law firm IT decision but grew out of the hard-won realization that most lawyers did not understand how law firms made money. They had no intuitive grasp of the inflection points that made their businesses thrive. That discovery was the product of a very deep dive into the brains of lawyers, not just by me but by a whole team of people trying to figure out how to help lawyers make business decisions. Early on, the most sophisticated technology we used was Excel. That was sufficient to highlight the fundamental problem. The result was more than a decade of work and a succession of ever-more-sophisticated business intelligence products, training regimens and support structures. As with the iPhone's development cycle, all of this stemmed from testing hypothesis aer hypothesis, trying first one approach and then another. The result was a completely transformed business process. IPhone-like product and service development cycles are available to anyone in any business organization. The cycles start with fundamental questions like "What is hard about our business? What needs to be made easier?" Maybe you don't start that sort of inquiry at the client level. Maybe you start it in the cubicle next to yours. And as with the iPhone, determining what is easy and what is hard comes not from the answer to a survey or even to in-person questions. The best data are an amalgam of observations—words, deeds, nonverbal clues, oblique behaviors. You definitely can begin by acquiring skill in the harvesting of such information. The Stanford Design School's Bootcamp Bootleg teaches the basics of observation and assimilation of user experiences. That's a beginning. From there, work your way to your own iPhone creation. Moving with discipline and with empathy, step by step, year by year, in the end you will discover that you have taken something difficult and created a brand new "Easy Buon." P2P 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 problem is not an inherent condition of lawyers but a lack of training in fundamental skills of helpfulness.

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