An opportunity to re-examine the status quo
Law departments' shifting priorities
The pandemic forced legal entities to transition to a virtual environment and caused financial challenges. As a result, law departments had to reorganize their priorities, with talent-related issues initially taking precedence and later shifting to cost and spending concerns, leading to a focus on governance-related measures to address budget constraints.
Opportunities for law departments and law firms
The challenges of 2020 have opened opportunities for law departments and firms to rethink their approach. Law departments can transform service delivery by focusing on agility, value, and technology, while collaborating with law firms to identify innovative ways to add value. Law firms, facing a contracting market, must adapt and differentiate themselves through sustainable operating models, optimizing practice areas, and finding new growth opportunities with cost control. Decisions made now will shape their future success.
Talent: developing the lawyer of the future
Participants discussed how to address talent, service delivery, and technology, focusing on nurturing skills for the future lawyer, adapting to the evolving practice of law accelerated by remote work, and collaborating among law departments, firms, and schools to equip lawyers with essential attributes like agility, problem-solving, and technological proficiency while eliminating implicit bias.
Tackling implicit bias: the foundation
DEI issues have been discussed for years as legal organizations face challenges in recruiting and retaining diverse talent. The events of 2020 brought DEI to the forefront, prompting a direct confrontation with the pervasive and insidious nature of implicit bias in the workplace, affecting employee development and satisfaction. The legal industry's traditional meritocratic culture may contribute to this bias, attributing success to individual ability and blaming others' lack of success on their supposed lesser ability, hindering progress toward diversity. To counter implicit bias, a holistic approach is necessary, including structured opportunities for all, active promotion of DEI policies by leaders, and personal commitment to counteracting biases to create an inclusive environment where everyone can flourish.
Skills: necessary "table stakes"
Lawyers' skills are constantly evolving, and legal organizations need to provide training and mentoring at all levels to adapt to the changing practice of law. Technology has affected training for new lawyers, as it has replaced some entry-level work and limited opportunities for informal learning. Law firms must supplement new lawyers' practice with intentional training programs, and corporate law departments may need to reconsider their hiring strategies in light of these changes. In the current remote environment, it is essential to ensure junior attorneys receive balanced work assignments to foster their development, and experienced lawyers must not only master technology but also develop skills associated with it, such as adapting to virtual hearings and embracing new tools and analytics.
Agility: the ability to flex and stretch
- Emphasize speed and efficiency. Attorneys should understand their organization's vision, adopt a client-centric mindset, and make quick decisions based on logic, avoiding exhaustive research in urgent situations.
- Empower people to act. Attorneys should be empowered with the freedom to experiment and learn from failures, encouraging curiosity to challenge the status quo without fear of retribution, and leaders must support well-intentioned actions, treating mistakes as learning experiences.
- Develop a culture of communication and collaboration. Developing agile lawyers requires a strong culture of teamwork, collaboration, and knowledge sharing, breaking down hierarchical barriers, and encouraging open communication, with the current remote environment facilitating increased participation from junior attorneys.
Collaboration: partnering for success
Legal organizations can equip lawyers for success by collaborating across the legal ecosystem and engaging with law schools to improve educational programs and develop essential soft skills like emotional intelligence and communication. Sharing efforts in teaching new skills, including soft skills, between law departments and law firms can lead to mutual benefits, fostering agility and adaptation to changing needs against a backdrop of inclusion to correct for implicit bias.
Service delivery: finding the right formula
Participants worked on developing a formula for modern legal service delivery, which included elements like challenging the status quo, delivering value through innovative solutions, emphasizing strong leadership and collaboration across the legal ecosystem to meet clients' holistic needs, and reimagining the workplace and problem-solving approaches in delivering legal services.
Reimagining the workplace
Participants emphasized the need for lawyers to challenge the status quo in both the workplace and legal service delivery. The pandemic accelerated the need for immediate adaptation, and some changes implemented during that time are expected to persist even after the pandemic. As we look to the future workplace, reimagining and rebuilding in innovative ways are crucial, considering the lessons learned from remote work and the increasing openness to change within legal organizations. This includes realigning business roles, reimagining client engagement in a virtual environment, and evolving business development strategies. Effective internal communication and thoughtful planning for the return to the workplace are also essential during this period of significant change.
Finding new solutions to the client's buisness challenge
Presentations and discussions highlighted the significance of a client-focused approach in legal service delivery, emphasizing the need to understand clients' objectives and environments and adopt customer-centric account management. Going beyond mere lip service, participants stressed the importance of finding innovative solutions to clients' total business challenges, moving beyond narrow legal issues. This holistic focus involves reimagining data as a strategic asset, acting as a comprehensive business advisor, and collaborating with non-legal professionals when necessary. While this thorough problem-solving approach may seem to clash with the need for agility, it's about investing time to identify the root cause of the client's problem and then rapidly adapting and implementing solutions as needed.
Building a strong structure
Modern service delivery relies on a structured foundation, encompassing strong leadership support, forward-thinking talent, and robust business processes. Leadership plays a vital role in motivating and supporting innovation, backed by a team of talented, flexible, and well-equipped individuals. The focus should be on developing effective systems and processes to address holistic problems rather than just immediate legal issues, avoiding excessive reliance on technology or constant adjustments to ensure excellent service delivery.
Collaborating across the legal ecosystem
Collaboration within the legal ecosystem is crucial for advancing service delivery. Legal organizations are realizing the benefits of collaborating with clients and even competitors to meet their clients' needs more effectively. Collaborating provides access to diverse perspectives and underutilized resources, fostering fresh ideas for complex challenges. Organizations that develop an optimal formula for service delivery, incorporating a reimagined workplace, client-focused solutions, and collaboration with stakeholders, can showcase their unique business value.
Technology: simplifying legal service delivery and maximizing data
Technology is the third pillar of Legal Lab, but it also enables the other two pillars—talent and service delivery—by digitizing information to support organizational transformation, automating processes to save attorney time and maximizing the utility of an organization’s data to improve client outcomes.
Transformation through digitization
COVID-19 has become a significant driver of digital transformation in the legal industry, accelerating ongoing efforts to embrace digitization. While obstacles like conservative mindsets and constant evolution exist, legal organizations must overcome them to succeed. Organizational culture can play a vital role by fostering experimentation and transformation, creating a shared sense of urgency and purpose. Digitization offers speed and flexibility, enabling quick responses to client needs, as demonstrated by one legal team's ability to efficiently evaluate a large number of contracts during the pandemic. Additionally, digitization improves collaboration between law departments and law firms, enhancing transparency and alignment in information sharing.
Automating and productizing repetitive areas of law
Leading law firms are finding success by automating repetitive legal tasks and turning them into accessible and scalable products, generating revenue while providing value to clients and the community. By productizing their expertise, firms can offer affordable access to their services for corporate clients and pro bono individuals, meeting the demand from both audiences and attracting top talent. However, this transformation requires careful consideration of business issues such as funding, resources, and cultural readiness before implementation.
- Funding. Productizing legal services requires a considerable up-front investment for an uncertain, long-term return.
- Business structure and talent. By productizing its knowledge, a firm is essentially setting up a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business. This requires expertise not commonly found in law firms, such as project management, product marketing, sales, customer service and more
- Cultural challenges. Lawyers' resistance to change, often due to the perception of their practice as unique and difficulty in identifying elements for productization, can be addressed by aligning incentives, targeting ready adopters first, fostering a culture of learning and growth, and providing adequate resources and support at various stages of their transformation journey.
- What to automate or productize. The choice of which practice areas to automate or productize can impact a firm's strategy and marketability. Identifying areas with clear interest in automation is essential, but other factors, such as marketability and suitability for productization, should also be considered. High-volume, repetitive work with predictable workflows, like contract management, certain disputes, and regulatory compliance, offers promising opportunities for automation. Additionally, pro bono products addressing "know your rights" education and election and voting rights were suggested as areas for potential collaboration between firms.
Artificial intelligence (AI): maximizing data for business value
The third segment of the Technology session focused on artificial intelligence (AI), which involves using data, processes, and human expertise to deliver business value, with AI being data-driven and capable of learning business logic rules from labeled output data rather than relying on traditional rules-driven programming.
- Success and readiness. The successful use of AI requires abundant, high-quality data, well-documented standardized processes, and expertise from data scientists to derive valuable insights. Organizations must be prepared to invest resources, accept the possibility of failure, and implement effective change management, along with articulating the benefits of AI to overcome skepticism among stakeholders.
- Legal industry uses. AI should only be used in the legal industry when there is a clear business value to justify the investment, focusing on areas like e-Discovery, contract review, legal research, and litigation pattern detection. It is most effective when it complements human expertise rather than replacing it, with collaboration between law departments and law firms offering potential opportunities for AI deployment.
- Risks. AI comes with risks such as unintended bias based on the data it is trained on, ethical dilemmas related to privacy and accountability, and the potential for societal disruption as it replaces certain jobs.
- Future of AI in legal. Participants expect AI to continue expanding in the legal industry over the next five years as teams become more aware of its capabilities and comfortable with the tools. They predict an increase in AI adoption for client service delivery, with law firms developing their own AI solutions to stand out from competitors, resulting in changed talent needs for incoming legal professionals and ultimately leading to increased efficiency, improved outcomes, and enhanced pricing, allowing lawyers to offer greater value.
Workshop: smart collaboration
Collaboration is critical to answering today's challenging situations
The final session of Legal Lab 2020 was a presentation and workshop by Harvard Law School’s Dr. Heidi Gardner, author of Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos and Smart Collaboration for In-House Legal Teams. Heidi Gardner's Smart Collaboration concept emerged as a response to two business trends: the growth of niche expertise and the complex, volatile nature of modern business problems. Collaborating experts with specialized knowledge can effectively address these challenges. The pandemic has brought forth multifaceted issues like talent management, regulatory shifts, and technology adoption, adding uncertainty and stress. Collaboration in law firms during the last recession led to better performance and growth, while self-focused individuals experienced a decline. The message is clear: in the current environment, collaboration is crucial for cultivating knowledge, fostering creativity, boosting productivity, innovation, strategic client relationships, and talent retention.
The diverse dimensions of smart collaboration
Gardner's Smart Collaboration concept encompasses seven behavioral dimensions, some problem-centered and others related to group dynamics. Organizations can intentionally assemble collaboration groups with a range of dimensions to be more effective and efficient. Though including people with diverse perspectives may be uncomfortable, it can reduce cultural friction and overlap with traditional measures of diversity, where historically underrepresented groups might feel the need to assimilate with the organization's dominant culture or behavior.
Putting smart collaboration to work
Gardner identifies four vectors for in-house counsel to collaborate: internal within the legal team, with leadership, with other corporate functions, and externally with law firms and regulators. In-house lawyers should strategically communicate with business executives and external providers to integrate perspectives effectively. Law firms should equip their law department clients to engage in these collaboration vectors consistently and effectively. For example, outside counsel can best support general counsel clients by serving as a sounding board, providing context, ongoing support, and helping achieve desired results. Collaboration is crucial for legal professionals to tackle complex challenges, and the workshop demonstrated the value of collaborating in the legal industry.
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