As change speeds up, law is no longer immune
“At PwC NewLaw we help legal departments with transformation,” said Mick. “We focus on setting strategy, change implementation, technology choice and adoption and managed legal and outsource solutions.
“The need to continuously improve, be more productive and drive positive change is not a new concept for the legal industry. The reason why it is such an important topic now for our industry is that the rate of change has never been greater. The often quoted saying that the pace of change today will be the slowest we will ever experience is a reminder the legal industry is no longer immune from being quantifiably measured, having outputs performed by technology and being invaded by an army of new non-traditional legal service providers.”
From saving time to creating value
Productivity savings have been the main innovation to come from legal tech to date. Mick predicts the next wave will be value creation through intelligent automation of more complex processes and documents.
“Many of the innovation initiatives in the legal industry have been focussed on productivity,” Mick observed. “For the past four years it’s been difficult, if not impossible, to attend a legal innovation conference that doesn’t have someone – myself included - talking about legal departments starting their innovation journey with an Instant NDA. The business case for investing in automated confidentiality agreements tends to start and stop with hours saved.”
Mick hopes the era of “Instant NDA” legal conferences is ending.
“Critically, what we’ve learned about automating basic agreements like NDAs has put us in good stead to build increasingly more complex automated processes and documents,” Mick said. “This leads to even greater productivity savings, but I also expect the focus to turn to not just saving time and money but creating greater value.
“I don’t think legal innovation poses a threat to the profession, but innovation focused only on productivity leads to a leaner, smaller and less impactful profession. We need to be innovating to create new value to maximise the potential impact our profession can have in the future.”
Harnessing the power of data to work better
Expect machine learning, further automation and workflow improvements to dominate the legal tech horizon.
“Today we are seeing new machine learning products that can analyse semi-complex third-party agreements in a matter of seconds and propose amendments with accuracy rates already greater than if the task was performed by a human lawyer. These technologies are yet to hit the mainstream, but it won’t take long,” observed Mick.
“In the meantime, I expect to see a greater investment in automating routine processes and document creation. I also expect to see a rapid uptake of adopting end to end technology platforms to capture data across legal departments and legal workflows more generally to enable better, faster and more impactful performance across the legal industry. This is the thinking behind PwC’s recent announcement of its multi-country strategic partnership with leading legal operations platform LawVu. As these changes take place the profession will cultivate a new range of capabilities such as process design, data science and knowledge optimisation.
“The great opportunity for the legal profession is to harness the great data sets that exist today in matters, contract repositories, risk registries and the like and provide new insights and value to the businesses it supports. If the legal profession doesn’t take this opportunity others will.”
Change must be mainstream to succeed
“Change is difficult,” said Mick. “Designing a new process or introducing a new technology is only the start of a much bigger change process. Successful transformation most likely has a string of false starts, hiccups and small failures along the way.”
To succeed, lawyers need support from leadership to drive change.
“Innovation cannot be something our lawyers do in their spare time when their ‘business as usual’ work allows it,” Mick said. “Change programs need to be given the same importance and resources as the day to day work, if not more. When a member of the legal team removes a step from a highly repeatable process or finds an automated way to measure a useful metric, these achievements need to be celebrated and rewarded in the same way we might recognise a lawyer that closed an important M&A transaction.”
Learn from disciplines who have changed
“Twenty years ago, nearly everything to learn about being a lawyer could be taught and observed from senior experienced practitioners,” said Mick. “Today senior practitioners still have a critical role to play but they will not be able to equip new lawyers with everything they will need to know about the future profession.
“New lawyers need to learn from other professions and disciplines, especially those that successfully deal with change and technology disruption. The most successful lawyers of the future will have a blend of these skills as well as subject matter expertise.”
Mick praised the Centre for Legal Innovation for playing a critical role in driving the profession to change through training, thought leadership, skills development and the provision of practical solutions.
“Compared to other professions, the legal profession has been slower to respond to disruptive forces such as technology and alternative service providers,” Mick noted.
“My observation is that until recently the same can be said of university law schools. The Centre for Legal Innovation has played and will continue to play a critical role in picking up the pace of change by focusing on training, thought leadership, skills development and practical solutions. It’s fantastic for the entire profession to see such energy, commitment and leadership devoted to securing the future of a profession that has done so much for society and will be able to do so much more.”
If you would like to chat with Mick live, please join us at the CLI Innovation in Legal Practice Summit in Melbourne on 9 August where he will be one of an amazing line up of panellists for our closing plenary on: “Implementing and Embedding a Culture of Change and Agility – Making ‘new’ work in a ‘traditional” world’. Register now!