Welcome to the future: making innovation happen

For much of the last generation, the knee-jerk position of many has been that law firms do not change. That's always struck me as an ignorant and naive point of view. In any sphere, change is ongoing and inevitable. Every law firm that is successful today is successful because someone in its past managed change effectively. Because they operate through a centralised 'consensus' model of (non) decision-making, most law firms are not institutionally set up to manage change especially well. Nonetheless, they have many pockets of change and innovation, which sort themselves out through normal organisational winnowing processes.

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with two leading law firm innovators about how technology is likely to impact the practice of law in the next few years. John Alber is the technology partner and head of the client technology group at Bryan Cave in St Louis. Mary Abraham, counsel at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York, helps lead the firm's knowledge management efforts. John and Mary recently returned from the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference, the leading peer networking organisation for legal technologists.

What were the top presentations at ILTA?

John Alber: "Since I was on the conference committee, that's like asking a parent to choose a favourite child. I have to say that I was very keen on the 'futures' presentations done with Richard Susskind, not the least because I had the privilege of working with Richard in one of them. I was also taken with the many manifestations of social media at the conference. There were many sessions treating the phenomenon, a reflection of its increasing prominence in the legal public mind. I find social networking is on the tongues (if not the fingertips) of many lawyers."

What do you predict will be three key technology-driven changes in law over the next 24 months, based on what you saw at ILTA?

JA: "I think enterprise search is finally here. I saw widespread recognition that tools like Recommind and other enterprise search platforms can, and should, do far more than simply help find documents. They are becoming the foundations of our knowledge enterprises. I found social media to be red hot, which is both a reflection of its presence in the public mind and a function of its utility in the modern enterprise. I think we'll see a rapid uptick in social media use."

Mary Abraham: "If Susskind is correct, the firms that embrace the current economic challenges as more than temporary discipline, and then use those challenges as incentive to understand and improve the way they deliver client services, will enjoy an enormous competitive advantage. So the first key change will be a perceptible gap between firms with 'disruptive technology' (technology that creates change in organisations and business models, as first described in Clayton Christensen's book The Innovator's Dilemma) and those without. This gap could be widened if Susskind's observation proves true that lawyers are more concerned about suffering a competitive disadvantage than having a competitive advantage. (In other words, he believes that most lawyers would rather keep up with the pack than forge ahead.)

"The second key change will occur in the way lawyers interact with clients. At ILTA the in-house counsel presentations and several law firm presentations pointed to a mode of operating in which firms offer a greater degree of transparency and access to their clients during a matter. One firm talked about providing a real-time collection of all email correspondence between the client and the firm. Another firm supplied online tools that allowed clients to analyse problems and create specific documents. Several others enabled clients to generate progress reports at will on projects those firms were carrying out.

"The third key change will occur in law firms. The drive to contain costs should push firms to find more efficient ways to share knowledge and speed the delivery of client services. The obvious answer is to increase transparency within the firm, not only among lawyers but also among administrative personnel. From the perspective of a knowledge manager, this will be a huge leap forward, since a firm that has easy access to what it knows can provide better service more efficiently. The key here is the need for cost containment, which should move firms away from expensive to maintain databases and document repositories toward simpler and cheaper ways of exchanging information, perhaps through the use of social media tools."

With regard to social media, it looks like Mary is a believer. I noticed you were Twittering from ILTA. What was that about?

MA: "I've always been an active note-taker at meetings. At a different conference earlier in the year, I discovered that if I packed my notes into a series of 140-character nuggets, then people who were unable to attend could follow along. The power of this became evident when a panellist at that earlier conference provided some inaccurate information, which I reported. Within moments, the correct information was sent to me via Twitter from someone 500 miles away who had been reading the Twitter updates. I then passed the correct information on to everyone attending the panel presentation. As the discussion continued, people outside the conference tweeted their questions, which were then put to the panelists. This allowed for a richer, multidimensional conversation among the panelists, the conference attendees, and the people following the session around the world via Twitter.

"This year many people who normally would have attended ILTA were unable to because of budget constraints. ILTA responded by asking several of us to blog and tweet conference sessions, thereby sharing widely the benefits of the conference. My understanding is that ILTA was sufficiently impressed by the value of these efforts that there will be more use of social media by the organisation going forward."

What did you think of Richard Susskind's presentation?

MA: "Susskind has a great gift for making one think differently about the practice of law. And that's exactly what I went to ILTA to find. While I had heard much of his talk before, I found that I listened differently in light of the economic pressures facing the legal industry. This time, I was particularly struck by his statement that we lawyers need to take a harder look at the components of the service we deliver to our clients. It was his contention that until we actually know what elements of that service can be standardised or automated and what elements truly must be tailor-made to suit a client, we won't be able to make intelligent, facts-based choices about how to improve our client service. Obviously, a key component of this is understanding exactly what it costs your firm to deliver a particular service. In this regard, I was very impressed by the work done by John Alber and Constance Hoffman at Bryan Cave to analyse the costs of client service and then model the impact of changing specific elements of that service in order to make it more efficient and cost-effective. Based on the audience reaction to their presentations, I suspect there are not nearly enough law firms in this country that are able to do something similar."

How are firms implementing these changes?

MA: "It may be a little too early to tell. From what I heard at ILTA, most law firms have spent the first year of the new economic reality trying to cut and contain costs. While this always is a useful exercise, it isn't the best or only solution to what may well be a fundamental challenge to the way we practise law. The ILTA presentations indicate that there is a path firms will have to travel: from cost-cutting and discounting, to detailed cost analysis and, finally, to rethinking how we work together with clients to deliver services. One danger is that zealous cost-cutting may deprive firms of the creative resources (both people and tools) necessary to reimagine the practice of law. That would be a pity, since many of Susskind's recommendations require enormous creativity, coupled with the ability to question the premises that underpin the last several centuries of legal practice.

"The other challenge relates to technology. While technology can provide substantial assistance in delivering client services more efficiently, current economic conditions may make any technology expenditure difficult. As a result, we're going to need greater ingenuity on the part of lawyers and technologists alike to improve client services by using existing tools in new ways. The good news is that the ILTA conference showed us how this need not be as hard as it sounds."

This article first appeared on The Am Law Daily blog on americanlawyer.com.