ABA and Rocket LawyerI was shocked last autumn when Rocket Lawyer, the legal technology company backed by Google Ventures, scored a deal with the ABA to test its services.  Now I am fascinated by what brought this experiment to a halt.
Had the state bar associations where the program was tested said that the service was not in the best interests of the lawyers they served, that would have been understandable. But according to this article, the bar associations themselves exhibited shameful self-interest:
“ABA Law Connect was tested in California, Illinois and Pennsylvania for roughly three months before being shut down in January. In two of the three test states—Pennsylvania and Illinois—the state bar associations struck back against the program, in part because they feared it would take business away from state and local bar referral services, which generate revenue for bar groups.”
Let me know your thoughts on this – or any other – matter, either in the comments below or directly via email.
Beagle
Screen capture from Beagle Inc. website

A new company with a virtual base in my home neighbourhood (by which I mean the island of Anguilla in the British West Indies: Note the “ai” in the company’s url: http://beagle.ai) has recently attracted attention from such media outlets as Fast Company, The Globe and Mail, and TechCrunch. The reason for the buzz is that Beagle has been chosen to participate in the second-ever MicroSoft Accelerator Class, and – with its physical base in Waterloo, Ontario – it’s the first Canadian company to have done so.

The tagline of Beagle is “We Sniff out the Fine Print So You Don’t Have To.” The company’s purpose is to simplify contract negotiations through the use of computer analysis that reads the “fine print” in contracts and distills their meaning  – and then allows input from stakeholders so that the contracts will better meet their needs. Using artificial intelligence technology, the program also “learns” the preferences of users with repeated application.

The Microsoft Accelerator Class offers promising startups a four-month residency at MicroSoft Venture headquarters in Seattle. Participating companies gain not only the benefit of MicroSoft expertise, they also make valuable contact with other startups at similar stages of development. “For us it’s a huge validation,” said Cian O’Sullivan, founder of Beagle Inc., in a Fast Company interview. “We’ve already seen immense interest in our company as a result of being selected.”

As always, I’m pleased to know your thoughts on this or any other matter, either in the comments section below or directly via email.

 

EIC Feb 2016I am pleased to draw the attention of readers of this blog to the most recent issue of Edge International Communiqué (EIC).

The issue features articles by two of my colleagues at Edge International. Sam Coupland offers important advice on how to assess the business value of a law firm, and Ed Wesemann probes the prickly issue of “origination credit” and the options for identifying and rewarding law-firm rainmakers.

In addition, the February, 2016 issue of EIC includes my article, “Hunting in Packs: Group Meetings with Prospective Clients.” In it, I set out some strategies that every lawyer should keep in mind (and put to use!) when two or more members of the firm are visiting a potential new corporate client or looking to expand business with an existing client.

Each month EIC publishes items of interest to lawyers around the world on various aspects of law-firm strategy, marketing, technology, management, economics, human relations and a host of other topics. In addition to the most recent edition, the Edge International site includes a sign-up page for those who are interested in subscribing to EIC, as well as a list of archived articles.

I welcome your thoughts and feedback on both Edge International Communique and Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices, either in the comments section below, or directly via email.

Screen capture from Riverview Law's KIM website
Screen capture from Riverview Law’s KIM website

The battle to outfit lawyers with useful virtual assistants is heating up. A few weeks ago we reported on the evolution of IBM Einstein for use in legal settings. Now, Riverview Law, one of the largest legal-services and private practice law firms in the world, has introduced a new virtual legal assistant named KIM (the name is an acronym for Knowledge, Intelligence and Meaning).

Gabe Friedman, who wrote about KIM’s debut for Bloomberg BNA, says that Riverview’s CEO Karl Chapman compares the new virtual assistant to Uber and Siri, “connect[ing] to a broad trend toward automation of services across all industries, and increasingly the legal sector.”

Friedman quotes Chapman as saying that “KIM could do things like understanding contracts more efficiently. There’s a way it can extract information from contracts and give them to a lawyer in a way so they can make better decisions.”

Although Friedman points out that, at this stage, “In general [Chapman’s] descriptions of KIM’s applicability tended toward the abstract,” and although KIM is currently targeted for placement with GCs rather than lawyers in private practice, there is no doubt that the application of artificial (or augmented) intelligence is moving ever closer to the practice of law in all its forms and manifestations.

I would be interested to know your thoughts on the future of AI in legal settings, or on any other matter, either in the comments section below, or directly via email.

In a recent article in Bloomberg BNA: Big Law Business, Susie Lees, Executive Vice President and General Counsel at Allstate Corporation, gets specific about how Allstate selects and retains outside law firms for the work its massive legal department can’t handle internally.

Lees’s comments about how Allstate works with outside counsel makes interesting and valuable reading, but I believe the message we need to take away from this interview relates to how necessary it is for us to listen to GCs, and not treat them like the enemy: we need to empathize, understand and then negotiate from there.

[Today] when I have [conversations about attorney fees] with business people, they talk about my budget. The more the law firms charge, the less I might have to pay my folks, or to do my training, or whatever it is that I want to spend in general. My business folks, whom I’m answerable to, are looking at this holistically. – Susie Lees

In other words, even a powerhouse like Susie Lees, sitting at the helm of the legal department of Fortune’s #89 company – with 650 inside lawyers – has to be sensitive to the inside business pressures.

Do you know what Lees’s pressures are? If you don’t, you don’t deserve to do her legal work. The same holds true for any client you hope to serve.

I welcome your feedback on this or any other matter either through the comments below, or directly via email.

 

Most of the largest and wealthiest law firms are run by senior lawyers with no real incentive to change how they do business.
Most of the largest and wealthiest law firms are run by senior lawyers with no real incentive to change how they do business.

Legal-issues writer Elizabeth Olson tackled the subject of the legal profession’s generational divide in “Graying Firms Wrestle with Making Room for Younger Lawyers,” an article recently published in the New York Times.

“If any discipline is a window into the debate about balancing short-term profits over long-term survival,” Olson wrote, “it is the legal profession, one of the most traditional businesses in the world.”

By interviewing a range of practitioners and observers from the field of law, and drawing on legal-industry research, Olson found that while the majority of firms (two-thirds of the largest ones in the U.S., she estimates) continue to operate in very traditional ways, and despite the fact that there is mounting evidence that the status quo is not sustainable in the new digitally-based world, change is not likely to occur in the near future. This is in part because senior partners are making too much money.

“There’s not enough pain to make them change of their own volition,” said Bruce MacEwen, who writes about legal economics at AdamSmithEsq.

Among those Olson interviewed was William Henderson, professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, who says that firms that stick to the old ladder-climbing model of partnership structure – rather than exploring new approaches to billing, technology and client relationships, as more future-minded firms are doing –could face their own demise when their senior lawyers do retire.

How pressing is the need to offer new associates a greater degree of free rein and entrepreneurial initiative than has traditionally been available, and to find new ways of compensating them? Let me know what you think about this (or any other) matter, either in the comments section below, or directly via email.

A YouTube video from a company named Switch demonstrates how business people and professionals are increasingly able to do more of their work remotely or at various different sites interchangeably – releasing them from the historic shackles of an office desk.
https://youtu.be/LTbevrimPZA
For better or worse, it is hard not to agree with the core message of this video:
We know that today, work is not a place you go, but a thing you do.
Anyone who is trying to balance two or three major life activities (e.g., a law practice and a family) will welcome any advances that allow a seamless transition of work from one location to another – not least a feature that allows you to turn it off completely when you are finished for the day.
Switch is just one of many companies that are working to increase our capacity to get work done no matter where we are, and perhaps even to take some guilt-free non-work time when we – or our families – need it.
I welcome your feedback on this or any other matter either through the comments below, or directly via email.

 

Tough DecisionsAn article by Peter Bregman in the Harvard Business Review will interest anyone faced with making a decision from among a range of equally appealing (or unappealing) options  – which, of course, happens to most of us all the time. Such deliberations can range from the relatively trivial, like deciding what to have for lunch, to the significant, such as determining how best to broach a difficult situation at the office.

In “Three Timeless Rules for Making Tough Decisions,” Bregman points out that assessing the positive and negative attributes of various choices that face us every day can be time- and energy-consuming, diverting our attention from the ongoing work we need to achieve as well.

Bergman recommends three strategies, depending on the type of decision that needs to be made: 1) using habits as fall-back positions for routine decisions; 2) using an “if-then” approach for unpredictable choices; and 3) giving ourselves (or our teams) a time limit for decisions where there is no clear-cut solution. He offers examples for each of these approaches, and these examples are useful in deciding which (if any) strategy is most applicable to a reader’s particular set of circumstances.

If you find you have been mulling over a problem for longer than you feel is necessary or useful, you may find a route through it by applying one of Bregman’s strategies.

I invite your feedback on this or any other issue, either in the comments section below or directly via email.

EIC2
Edge International Communiqué, December, 2015

I am pleased to draw the attention of readers of this blog to the most recent issue of Edge International Communiqué (EIC).

The issue features articles by two of my colleagues at Edge International, as well as one that I wrote. Nick Jarrett-Kerr offers advice on choosing effective law-firm leadership teams, and Mike White discusses some “closing” strategies that may help you give any “waffling” client prospects a bit of a nudge that could bring them into your fold.

In my article – “A Business Development Reality Check” – I imagine a world in which you could simply push a button and new clients with deep pockets would walk in off the street and offer you their business. Of course, that is just a fantasy, but the good news is that we all have the skills and power at our fingertips to bring about equivalent results –  as long as we are prepared to do the work. My article explains how.

Each month EIC publishes items of interest to lawyers around the world on various aspects of law-firm strategy, marketing, technology, management, economics, human relations and a host of other topics. In addition to the most recent edition, the Edge International site includes a sign-up page for those who are interested in subscribing to EIC, as well as a list of archived articles.

I welcome your thoughts and feedback on both Edge International Communique and Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices, either in the comments section below, or directly via email.

 

 

 

Watson
IBM Watson training for its appearance on Jeopardy (link is to YouTube)

Fresh from defeating its human opponents on Jeopardy, IBM Watson has now begun to demonstrate its artificial-intelligence capacities in the real world. Watson and its counterparts are already being used in such fields as medicine, education, security and defense intelligence, and now work is underway to develop “brand new baby versions of Watson” that will be suitable for use in legal settings.

At a recent Legal Futures Innovation Conference in London, Kyla Moran, a senior consultant from IBM’s cognitive computing team, said that law-specific AI platforms are only a few years off, and that apps relevant to legal practice can be developed “‘immediately’ by any interested legal services provider, via IBM’s Bluemix platform.”

In reporting on the session, Dan Bindman reports that IBM projects a “massive potential” for use of its new cognitive computing technology in legal contexts, starting in the very near future. Moran described to session participants several possible legal applications that ranged from the mundane (keeping lawyers updated on changes to legislation, advising them on best options for individual clients, and dealing with paperwork) to the “slightly creepy” (“[deciding] which arguments in court might play well or badly with a particular judge at a given time of day”).

According to Ms. Moran, Birdman says, “Businesses purchasing Watson technology for a specific purpose could be up and running within six months [… although] the first generic ‘Watson for legal’ type application could take a year or more to develop.”

IBM describes Watson as “a technology platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of unstructured data.” Bindman’s article about IBM Watson’s potential legal applications (and its legal implications), is interesting and thorough. Since you probably don’t yet have a robot that can read the article for you and let you know how AI may impact your particular practice, I encourage you to check it out yourself.

Let me know what you think about the future of artificial intelligence at the law (or any other matter), either in the comments section below, or directly via email.