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Lawyers Must Be Agents of Change
Technology | Khaled Shivji
This article has been adapted from an article originally published on Lexis Middle East and first appeared in “The MENA Business Law Review No.01/2023” – https://www.lexis.ae/2023/06/13/the-mena-business-law-review-no-01-2023-is-out/
Lawyers cannot continue to pay lip service to legal technology and digital disruption. The legal industry must embark upon a wholesale set of reforms by adopting technology to reduce costs, accelerate legal transactions, and automate legal decision making.
Overview
Lawyers must learn how to guide, influence and shape colleagues’ expectations in order to help clients realise the benefits arising out of digital disruption. As stated at the AiEverything Conference in Dubai in May 2019, “[s]ome people think Al is the future. Its already here.”
The legal industry is ill-prepared for being digitally disrupted. Our clients are already digitally transforming their businesses by integrating artificial intelligence into their business processes, building networks centred around the Internet of things, and using the blockchain to transact online and to interact with their customers in new and exciting ways.
For example:
- In Dubai, CAFU, a service that delivers fuel to cars on-demand uses artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to forecast where to situate their fuel trucks. Customers benefit from near real-time delivery of fuel and CAF benefits by being able to maximise the number of transactions it undertakes during peak hours.
- London (UK) still has one of the world’s highest rates of premature deaths caused by air pollution. The Mayor of London’s office and the Royal Borough of Greenwich have installed loT connected-air quality monitors that supply real-time data to teams tasked with improving London’s air quality. The data allows them to design one-way streets, cycle paths and walkways to direct people away from the most polluted areas.
- Seattle-based coffee chain, Starbucks (you might have heard of them!) wants to enable consumers to be able to use the Eretheum blockchain to track how far their coffee travelled from plantation to coffee cup. We might be on the verge of linking ethical-sourcing with free market economics by enabling consumers to, if they wish, support ethical, conflict-free supply chains.
Lawyers cannot continue to pay lip service to legal technology or digital disruption. The legal industry must embark upon a wholesale set of reforms by adopting technology to reduce costs, accelerate legal transactions, and automate legal decision making. The Association of Corporate Counsel and Major, Lindsey & Africa’s in its 2019 Global Legal Department Benchmarking Report stated:
“[legal technology] streamline[s] time consuming processes and reduce[s] the amount of time spent on low-value work. It is essential for establishing and maintaining an efficient legal department.”
Unfortunately, the pace of change is too slow. Fewer than half of all respondents had adopted legal technologies. This indi cates that legal departments lack the confidence, expertise and, more importantly, skills, to adopt off-the-shelf legal technology. This is worrying. We must listen to clients, learn how they require our services, lead that change and steer ourselves from a pathway of uncontrolled disruption (or extinction). However, how will we get there?
However, this model relies upon economic market forces to ensure that laypersons are not priced out of being able to afford legal services.
At various points of any economic cycle, a free and functioning market has to “correct” itself by voluntarily permitting new entrants (or involuntarily being disrupted) to enter the market and to lower the cost of services. I believe that the legal industry has no compelling incentives to voluntarily open its doors to new entrants- which means, it must face reform by being disrupted.
The Agents of Change
“Laypeople need to be empowered to think more like lawyers; but for this to happen, lawyers will need to think less like lawyers and more like agents of social change.”[1]
Lawyers must become agents for change. They must educate, inform, challenge and educate colleagues on how to test and deploy innovative, prototype solutions that meet the needs of tomorrow’s clients while respecting the needs of current clients. That is not easy.
The culture within law firms and legal departments also plays a huge role in facilitating change, or as the case may be, resisting change. Change can bring about immeasurable benefits but often does, lead to a lot of emotional pain, stress, failure and recrimination.
We are a profession of laggards-this means as an industry, when new technology emerges onto the market, the legal industry falls into the segment who are traditionally the slowest to adopt that technology, preferring to watch others trial and experiment that technology before adopting it. As a result, we force clients to conform with outdated concepts such as attending face-to-face meetings, billing by the hour, and signing contracts with pen and ink. We do this because it is easier for us to do, rather than admit that we need to change.
There are many reasons for this:
I. Regulatory pressure, or the lack of it
Lawyers are insulated from regulatory pressure to change. Lawyers enjoy a near monopoly on legal services in mostjurisdictions. It is universally accepted that legal services ought to be independent from government oversight so as to facilitate the independence of the profession.[2] However, this creates inefficiencies within the legal services market leading to expensive fee structures, a poor allocation of resources (i.e., expensive fee earners tasked with performing low-value work) and clients who experience long contract lifecycles, legal department bottlenecks, and dissatisfaction with the quality of services that they receive. It is no wonder lawyers still form the butt of jokes about how expensive they are to use and how slow they are to provide advice and services.
II. Human habits are very difficult to change
Implementing change within any organisation takes months to achieve because human habits are difficult to change.[3] One of the biggest complaints I have heard from junior lawyers and change managers who pitch new technology is that they uncover a stubborn refusal to adopt new technology because the general counsel or senior partner does not want to have to remember another username and password! Quite ironic to think that despite memorising years of case outcomes, precedents and terminology, the best excuse for not adopting change is a need to remember another username and password.
However, with the right approach to change, organisations can adopt “single sign on” tools or biometric scanners such as fingerprint readers on laptops to reduce the volume of usernames and passwords that need to be memorised. But relies upon the same general counsel and senior partners to work with their IT departments and to champion that change. It turns into a cycle of defeatism whereby change initiatives are continually blocked by budget-holders who might otherwise be able to lead that change.
Ill. Vocational training needs to incorporate disruptive technology
The system of vocational legal training is based upon graduates and trainees learning tried and tested techniques from senior lawyers on how to deliver legal services. The author accepts that the basics need to be mastered; however, digital disruption does not feature within the syllabus of an intensive training programme. Linklaters challenged this model with the launch of its digital internship teaching programme, which is open to all students from a law or non-law background and teaches them about how to use eSignatures, artificial intelligence and other technologies within a legal setting. Law schools should adopt courses like these and equip their students with the confidence, know-how and vision of incorporate digital technology into legal practice.
Some examples of how digital technology can be incorporated into legal practice:
- Social media has lowered the reading age and attention spans of most office-based employees-a legal memo stretching into several pages (and potentially costing thousands of dollars to research, draft, and be signed-off within a law firm’s governance processes) might be better kept in the archives and instead distilled to a few lines of advice for a client to use to based their business decisions.
- Legal departments tend to experience strong pressure from shareholders and boards to become leaner, more efficient, and faster at delivering legal services as part of an overall corporate focus to maintain profitability. However, it is very difficult for legal departments to export and commoditise innovation so that it can be sold to other legal departments (or law firms). BT Law was one of the few successful outsourced innovative legal services providers to achieve this-BT pie’s legal department created an innovative claims management service to handle accident claims involving its own fleet of vehicles. It was so successful that BT spun off the service to become BT Law, allowing other in-house teams to import innovation into their own organisations. Other legal departments ought to do the same by showcasing their legal processes and offering these on a commercial basis to other organisations and law firms as means of creating and driving shareholder value.
- Clients should be able to use their smart phones to locate law firms anywhere in the world. Clients, should in theory, be able to locate trusted law firms and freelance lawyers online without being compelled to use the lawyer whose office is physically the closest to their place of business.
- Clients should be able to obtain legal news as easily as browsing through a law firm’s Facebook timeline. They should be able to access legal content, programming, training guides and even Al-facilitated videos by watching on-demand video streaming sites. They should be able to collaborate with lawyers and share content as easily as using Instagram and Slack.
- In parallel, clients should be able to complete KYC checks online and have a pre-vetted online profile (and credit risk rating). This will enable lawyers to utilise a risk-based approach on how to price their fees as opposed to investing huge sums of money offering client hospitality and bidding for new client mandates.
Conclusions
Who should act as a change agent within a law firm? The managing partner? The CIO (assuming they have one)? The professional support lawyers? How about the new trainee?
The answer is: all lawyers, at all levels of seniority. Lawyers need be able to analyse the way in which the industry as a whole operates and to continue to ask themselves “Is there a better way?”. Law firms and in-house departments ought to regularly review how they interact with clients, identify pinchpoints, and suggest ways to improve accessibility to legal services. This concept does not require lawyers to obtain technology degrees (or be trained in how to apply technology within the workplace); however, it does require a change in mindset and, perhaps, a difficult glance through the looking glass at today’s world.
[1] S. Golub, The Legal Empowerment Alternative, in Promoting Rule of Law Abroad, In Search of Knowledge (Thomas Carothers ed., 2006), as quoted in “Anyone can think like a lawyer: how the lawyers’ monopoly on legal understanding undermines democracy and the rule of the law in the United States”, 82 Fordham L. Rev. (2014).
[2] The United Nations’ Basic Principles on the Role of lawyers at Article 16 requires governments to ensure that lawyers can act independently while acting in accordance with recognised professional duties, standards and ethics: https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/roleoflawyers.aspx.
[3] D. Rock, “The fastest way to change a culture”, https://www.forbes.com/ sites/davidrock/2019/05/24/fastest-way-to-change-culture/#303529913d50.