What does innovation mean for a legal firm? Can lawyers take advantage of today’s technological developments to streamline their processes? We live in an exciting time, in which the current situation has led legal practitioners to rethink everything, from the way they present themselves to the market to the way they offer and deliver their services.
Transformation is a Long-Term, Ongoing Race
The one thing we can be sure of is that it is time to focus on the client more than ever, and this must permeate the culture of every organization.
Forging a client-centered culture requires change at a core level, often involving cultural disruption. This is not a linear process; on the contrary, it is an arduous one that requires a thorough analysis of the potential challenges within and outside each organization, sometimes taking one step forward and two steps back at the outset.
To achieve this, it is necessary to provide all members of your organization with the necessary tools and spaces to properly use methodologies enabling them to find new tailor-made challenges and solutions, always centered on the client (internal or external), such as “Design Thinking”, “Agility”, “Scrum”, among other methodologies.
What would be the first steps to make this possible? First of all, creating a cross-disciplinary team including individuals engaged in designing client-centered solutions through a process made up of stages, which helps to understand the client’s needs or issues, identify business opportunities, create and test solutions, and eventually communicate them. This requires dynamic teams, dedicated spaces, limited time frames, and promoting a new culture of thinking, i.e. being inquisitive, observing and detail-oriented, not being afraid to experiment, being open to other angles and, above all, being tolerant of uncertainty.
In line with the above, the teams you build could split up their respective processes into the following stages: (i) the empathy stage, approaching the client, to identify their pain points, and gain insights (hidden truths of your client or implicit needs); (ii) the co-creation stage, where insights come into action, until a solution is outlined; and the (iii) devising stage to solve the challenge and deliver an effective solution to the client.
Turning Services into Products
No one is trying to reinvent the wheel here, but rather new ways of using it. In that sense, it is always useful to learn from those who are already going through this transition and have generated new products that bring real value to their clients through cultural change and by implementing new technologies.
Examples of these initiatives are given below, broken down by the type of technology applied:
- Cloud Computing: Software such as CaseTracking allow lawyers to manage all their court cases online, as the program is not installed on a PC but accessed from a web browser. This means that lawyers can keep track of their cases anywhere in the world, at any time of the day (24/7) and using any device connected to the internet.
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA): UiPath is an RPA program that can automate processes such as legal docket classification, legal instrument analysis, report generation, contract management, e-discovery, among others, in a very accurate and efficient way.
- Artificial Intelligence: Through the use of Artificial Intelligence, AXIOM LAW, a company providing on-demand legal services, founded in 2000 and a pioneer in New Law, has managed to analyze historical records of court decisions to find patterns and trends, forecast possible court rulings, and analyze the arguments of opposing counsels to design better legal strategies, both for prosecution and defense.
These legal innovation concepts are driving transformation in the industry. This is mainly due to the fact that now more than ever the client has become a central part of the business model and that legal service providers are promoting the use of new technologies and methodologies to streamline their response to their clients’ needs. In short, now is an exciting time, filled with challenge, for all legal professionals.
Article by Christian Leon, lawyer at our Innovation and Entrepreneurship Department.
For advice on legal matters, contact us at informes@cpb-abogados.com.pe