TOP 5 GAME-CHANGING TAKEAWAYS FROM THE LEGAL GEEK 2019 NORTH AMERICAN CONFERENCE

I attended Legal Geek’s North America 2019 conference #legalgeek last week in Brooklyn. As we all know, the value of these events is found in the people you meet and the informal discussions you have and Legal Geek was no exception- enjoyed experiencing a level of creativity and collaboration often found in legal tech circles.

Most of the talks appeared to cover the same topics we have been hearing in the industry at other events and in legal tech news and blogs. But, for the astute listener there were golden nuggets of deeper insight with each talk. And this is because of the caliber of speakers- people who are on the forefront and dealing with the opportunity and challenges of legal innovation day to day.

Here are the top 5 takeaways I took from the day that I know will be helpful to me and hopefully will be helpful to others who are working on real solutions to improve the experiences of both legal services providers and clients receiving those services.  

Those who master and leverage even just any one of these 5 can create game-changing new value in the marketplace:

#1: THE “WHY” BEHIND LAWYER ADOPTION CHALLENGE

Those in legal innovation circles are the first to tell you that one of the biggest challenges is getting lawyers to buy in or adopt what are seemingly “win win” obvious solutions to improving their working lives and the legal profession in general.  

Tess Blair of Morgan Lewis gave an insightful presentation that helped to explain why. And understanding the "why" is the key to overcoming the challenge. We need to understand the psychology of lawyers: extremely high ratings for skepticism, autonomy and urgency and lower ratings for resiliency and sociability.

These traits are directly contrary to the entrepreneurial and early adopter traits needed to jumpstart change (optimism, collaboration, patience, failure and experimentation). With lawyers, don’t start from a position of innovation. From inception, create messaging and adoption processes that align with these lawyer traits.

Susan Hackett(LawExecs) and Karl Chapman (Riverview Law) also offered impactful advice to help with lawyer adoption and change. Everyone is talking about how to automate or optimize the operational level work of lawyers through technology, processes and lower skilled workers. 

But there has not been enough thought and talk about the higher level work performed by lawyers. When a lawyer is hired by a client, there is always higher level work- it is what the clients are truly paying high dollars for. Susan confirms that no one is defining what “higher use” is for lawyers. 

And because we have not focused on this, too much weight is given to the other side of the story (the lower level stuff). And this creates fear emotions of being displaced or of negative change. But the reality is actually positive change: Once lower level work is delegated/automated, lawyers can now fill more of their time with higher use work- the activity they enjoy and that intellectually stimulates them.

Lawyers should take the time to reverse engineer how they work- determine what activities are your highest use. We finally have the ability to work toward doing the pieces we enjoy doing the most and to disaggregate and delegate the rest to technology and other resources. 

Yes, it will take a change in how we work but adoption will be higher if we can now see and feel the benefits of this change instead of the downside of disruption.

#2: CODING LAW INTO PRODUCTS AND SYSTEMS

Most of what you hear in legal tech these days involve supporting lawyers or alternate providers when it comes to legal services delivery.

Jeroen Plink of Clifford Chance gave an entertaining presentation which challenged us to think about creating products and solutions that applied the law automatically in an invisible fashion. The benefits are to reduce friction and improve better customer experiences. 

Some of this is happening today but it is not talked about nearly as much. He gave great examples such as using technology to enforce speed limits in cars and automating contract enforcement of loan agreements.  

The opportunity of legal innovation goes way beyond just law firms and legal departments, but lawyers stand in a unique position to leverage these opportunities as they best understand the law and have the depth of practical experience to know how law is actually applied in real world situations.

#3: THE POWER OF CONNECTION

I work for a company (Tasktop Technologies) that has revolutionized an entire industry by focusing on breaking down silos to allow people, processes and technologies to better work together in a more seamless environment.

So, I immediately got the power of what Irish McIntyre of Thomson Reuters, Christian Lang (Reynen Court), Karl Kong (Axiom) and Tim Pullan (ThoughtRiver) spoke about and that is the exponential power of connection. They each spoke about collaboration, connection and/or interoperability – of technology, people or processes.

If you are an entrepreneur in legal tech, there is huge opportunity in exploring connection/integration and network effects as part of your business model.

#4: THE COMING AVALANCHE OF STANDARDIZATION

Back in the mid 2000s I was the General Counsel for an open source software company. Open source license agreements for the most part are standardized. Once you read the Apache open source license agreement, for example, you do not need to review it again when using it for another transaction.

Back then I wondered why there was not similar standardization with other straightforward legal documents. And this thought has haunted me over the last decade when I see how much of my time and the time of my legal team is spent on reviewing and negotiating NDAs. Why cannot there be a standardized NDA? 

So, I was thrilled to hear Jim Brock’s (Trustbot) talk revealing his company’s release of an open source based standard NDA backed by blockchain. I will definitely be checking it out: https://trustlayer.trustbot.io/

And Tim Pullman (ThoughtRiver) describes a research project they did that revealed 350,000 variations of a 60 word provision for choice of law: “Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had standards/frameworks for these simple definitions?”

Joshua Lenon (Clio) also had a great talk and spoke about the power and potential of standards. 

I predict that standards will take hold in the legal industry for significant chunks of existing contract work- especially once the large corporate legal clients start adopting them.

#5: THE POWER OF DATA & COMPETITIVE EDGE

Catherine Krow of Digitory Legal gave an awesome presentation about the power of data: “Nothing moves the needle on decision making more than actionable data.” 

I coupled her talk with Joshua Kubicki’s talk about competitive advantage. Legal businesses should be looking for their competitive advantage more than ever now. A great place to start is to capture and analyze the valuable data they have hidden in their companies. Data is a valuable asset that established legal firms and departments have over new players.

I have seen the transformative power of data in other industries. Executive level managers crave actionable data. Joshua also spoke about the current challenges within law firms caused by the status quo v. the innovative efforts – operational stress. Nothing can help break that conflict and determine which is the best way to go and where to put your investment than accurate data.

As Catherine states: leveraging data to produce decision grade data “takes time and money” – but in today’s world where data is more valuable than most any other asset- this effort is a very worthy investment if you ask me.

SUMMARY

Legal Geek North America started with an inspiring talk by Mark Cohen, someone I have followed for a long time for his insightful commentary online: The legal evolution is a movement much like Woodstock was. It is here. Let's have fun with it and improve the work and experience of ALL involved.

The event ended with an equally inspirational talk by Dan Jansen (Nextlaw Ventures) confirming that venture capital is interested in legal business ventures but we need to help investors better understand the nuances of our industry- the value opportunity is here- legal tech is where fintech was in its earlier stage. Fintech executed well and now it is our turn!