Innovation and Emerging Technology

INNOVATION AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

COPYRIGHT © 2014, RON DOLIN1

Ron Dolin, J.D., Ph.D.

Research Fellow

Center on the Legal Profession

Stanford Law School

Law Firm Leaders Forum

New York, Nov. 6-7, 2014

PART 1

COPYRIGHT © 2014, RON DOLIN 2

Substantive Hints of Change:

Innovative Technology Popping Up

FIDELITY: ESTATE PLANNING PILOT

Go-to place for retirement planning

Marketplace between clients and lawyers

Company reputation at stake

How to use, pass information?

How to set pricing?

How to guarantee quality?


LEGALZOOM ENTERS SAM'S CLUB Avoids UPL with lawyer review

Competing against non-consumption

Minimal (but existent) quality requirements

Moving up-market with low margin model

Increasing corporate work


STARTUPS AND ABS'S AFA all around

Improved value: quality up, costs down

Riverview, Everlaw, Novus Law, Ravel, Modria, Lex Machina, etc.

Legal services without law firm constraints

Focus on client needs and design process


CORPORATE CLIENTS Google wants to measure ROI on legal spend by

measuring law firm value (e.g. quality); 500 attorneys with 40 engineers.

Cisco at 80% flat fee with standard business metrics (performance) – not law firm metrics.

Fad or movement?

(“Inc.” magazine article once said that the web was a fad and compared it to CB radios.)


OPTIMIZING PRODUCT PURCHASING*


* innovias.com

OPTIMIZING SERVICE PURCHASING*


* innovias.com

IN GENERAL (E.G. LEGAL)*


* interactioneurope.com


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E-discovery Quality(hypothetical)

Relative Cost

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PART 2


Legal Design:

Structured Innovation Process

Focus on Client/User Needs

INNOVATOR'S DILEMMA/SOLUTION* Threats and opportunities

Sustaining innovation – efficiency

Disruptive innovation – new markets

Non-consumption – simple requirements

Unknown and unknowable markets


* Christensen/Raynor

LAW FIRM INNOVATION

Compare marketing (2-3%) with innovation budget.

Measuring ROI on marketing (which focuses on current offerings)?

Propose: 1% on innovation.

Focus: pilots and business models,

not large-scale software development.


TECHNOLOGY REQUIRES INTEGRATION Seyfarth – client-focused

engineering team

Fenwick – doc automation startup pipeline

New business opportunities? Law firm API (micro-

questions)?

Automated contract analysis (text analysis)?

Alternate settlement models (big-data)? COPYRIGHT © 2014, RON DOLIN 14

INNOVATION PROCESS

Independent team, dedicated budget

Discovery-based planning, not stage-gates

Identify assumptions, test early, repeat

Budget must include learning through trial-and-error


LEGAL DESIGN PROCESS

Stanford's d.school – dschool.stanford.edu (Margaret Hagan)

Structured: empathy, ideation, testing, etc.

Applied to the legal system generally (estate planning, immigration, patent system...)

Applicable to law firms


CONCLUSION

Design work is simply a structured approach to discovering and solving (client) needs

The design process is being applied across the legal system, including (some) law firms and their new competitors

The challenge is not how to incorporate technology – it's how to incentivize innovative behavior



[email protected]

@legalnoise

radicalconcepts.com; legaltechdesign.com

Innovation and Emerging Technology

Law

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