Download Full fathom five and how not to drown in the Technology Sea

Edition: September 2016
Full fathom five and how not to drown in the Technology Sea
Collaboration, cloud, innovation, new business models, disruption, BigLaw, NewLaw and
so it goes on. There seems to be no end of prescriptions available to law firms as they seek
to act differently and embrace technology. Here are five areas firms should be focusing on
from a technology perspective, writes Mark Andrews.
First, a concession – it would be wrong to assert that there are only five technology themes
worthy of focus, but law firms ignoring the following areas do so at their peril in an era
when digital disruption, artificial intelligence and other technology forces are coming to the
fore. There is no great logic to the order of the themes below, other than perhaps the first
one, which is fundamental to the profession of law in the technology age.
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Security
There is no doubt that security is of fundamental importance for every law firm. Law is very
much a profession of trust, of risk identification and mitigation, and of careful analysis and
anticipation of problems. In the area of IT security, leaders of firms need to ask these
questions:
Do they have clear responsibility and ownership for IT security?
Do they have sufficient competence within the firm to manage IT security, or should they be
engaging external expertise?
Do they allow convenience to triumph over security?
Do they have a comprehensive understanding of what data they hold and why it would be
attractive to others?
Are they educating lawyers and support staff in cybersecurity risks?
Are they behaving with the same level of professionalism internally and externally when it
comes to social media posting and general engagement with IT outside of work?
Have they completed an assessment of potential areas of IT security risk and mapped
mitigation strategies to the risks?
Security is very much first base and, if firms are not dealing with it adequately, it must be
addressed. Firms would be ill advised to embrace technologies such as cloud, collaboration
tools, artificial intelligence or anything else without first addressing security and having it in
mind as they consider other technologies.
The Australasian Law Management Journal is produced by the Australian Law Management Group
of the Legal Practice Section of the Law Council of Australia
www.lawcouncil.asn.au/almj
Collaboration
Just for a change, let us start from the basis of not rushing to embrace the latest
collaboration tool or developing a new internal social media tool. It is a gross generalisation
to assume that firms want to collaborate all the time and that they need the technology to
help them collaborate. There seems to be a collaboration paradigm running through the
minds of some and it can be seen in the design of office space, as well as in the choice of
technology.
I remember reading with some amusement an advertisement for headphones that claimed
the product could generate sufficient white noise to block the noise generated in an openplan environment. This same open-plan environment had been promoted as a way of
increasing collaboration, yet products such as the headphones were now being rolled out to
make it far less collaborative. It highlights the use of personas and the need to think more
about hybrid design for physical space which better mixes alternate work areas.
The gist of my argument is not that open-plan offices are bad or that firms should not adopt
collaborative tools. Rather, they need to start with a far more nuanced approach and
understanding of their own organisations. Once they have this understanding, they should
then be looking at opportunities for real-time document collaboration, conferencing in all its
many and varied forms (audio, video, virtual etc), internal social media, online collaborative
spaces, virtual reality and so forth.
Yes, firms need to collaborate, but not around the clock and not in the same way in every
part of the business. Yes, they do need to embrace technologies that help them collaborate,
but this is not a case of deploy it and they will come. Firms must start by constructing a
range of personas that represent different work styles. From these personas they can then
build realistic scenarios of how collaboration technology can assist and how they can start
thinking about physical space in varied ways that allows different personas to operate
optimally.
For example, if you were to map the typical day of a corporate M&A partner and the day of
a graduate lawyer in litigation, you would no doubt see differences in terms of
collaboration; such as time at desk, time in meetings, individual concentration time and so
forth. As you map other roles you will start to see clusters of particular work styles. These
clusters become the personas. You can then create fictional names for the personas and use
them to test things such as space design and use of collaborative technology.
Analysis is no excuse for paralysis, so firms should not spend too long perfecting the
personas before they try the technology.
The Australasian Law Management Journal is produced by the Australian Law Management Group
of the Legal Practice Section of the Law Council of Australia
www.lawcouncil.asn.au/almj
Lawyer productivity
Content remains the centrepiece of the profession of law – it is the output of firms’
collective efforts. How the content is produced must be a key focus for firms as technology
continues to evolve. At a base level this revolves around standard tools and templates,
precedents and best examples. Taking this a step further, firms can move to document
automation and intelligent authoring tools which speed up the process of generating base
documents.
Beyond this, firms have an opportunity to move to artificial intelligence, through which they
can start to build in machine learning to the process of producing documents. There are
tools, for example, that assist with the quality of drafting and the clarity of language. More
sophisticated examples of AI being used within law firms are also emerging. One example,
and there are many, is British law firm Baker & Hostetler employing IBM’s Ross, dubbed the
‘world’s first artificially intelligent attorney’, to redefine its bankruptcy practice. Ross can
read and understand language, come up with his own hypotheses and learn from previous
experiences.
Sharing content is another dimension undergoing change and this includes tools focused
more on security, such as meta-data stripping, through to those that assist in secure file
sharing, document comparison, manipulation, editing and publication.
A less glamorous aspect of lawyer-productivity tools is voice recognition which, if anything,
remains underutilised, partly due to it being seen as part of a dictation solution. This is as
much to do with presentation and positioning as the same reservations do not exist with
mobile-based speech recognition in the non-work world.
It is important to have a roadmap in the area of lawyer productivity, not to lock in a path,
but to at least have a direction and be attuned to market developments and new
technologies. Some of the process-mapping techniques – such as value-stream analysis and
the focus on waste reduction through Lean and the rigour of the Six Sigma methodology –
have roles to play.
Whether or not lawyer productivity flows on to lawyers being replaced by robots is unclear,
but if history is anything to go by there will be new roles for lawyers that firms are yet to
imagine. However, elements of the next stage can already be seen within firms that are
adopting hybrid people and technology-AI solutions.
The Australasian Law Management Journal is produced by the Australian Law Management Group
of the Legal Practice Section of the Law Council of Australia
www.lawcouncil.asn.au/almj
Learning
We often pay insufficient attention to the area of learning and how technology can assist. I
have written previously in this publication about the potential role of AI/bots in the area of
legal education. Firms must give serious consideration to how they can use technology to
better supplement existing professional development methods. Examples may include
offering short video-based training, or providing interactive online training through tools
such Skype for Business. They should also think about things such as gamification.
Pokemon Go, for instance, has demonstrated the potential for games to engage and
motivate people, but what if the application of digital game techniques – such as the use of
an ongoing digital rewards system that has so entranced Pokemon aficionados – could be
applied to sometimes tedious, non-game problems and tasks in the legal sector. Similarly, if
airforce pilots can use simulation games for training, why not lawyers?
Technology may also offer a way to partly rebuild the apprenticeship model, which has
served the profession so well for so many years (with senior lawyers passing on rich learning
opportunities to juniors) but which has now been eroded. As suggested in the earlier
column, there is the prospect of using AI as a ‘coach’ to fill in young lawyers’ knowledge
gaps, providing a safe learning environment and reducing the burden on senior lawyers’
time.
Hardware
I feel compelled to finish the five areas with hardware – it has proven to be a great force for
change in many firms. One has only to look at the embrace of mobile working and the
associated technologies to appreciate its impact. In the area of hardware, firms need to be
more proactive while remaining ready to be reactive.
What does this mean? Quite simply that the innovation in hardware is unlikely to slow, so
firms need to be ready to react and adopt as new hardware innovations enter society and
the workforce. Equally, they can be more purposeful in identifying hardware that will
genuinely enhance the practice of law, whether it is purposeful redesign of workspaces to
embrace technology, more planned adoption of certain mobile technologies, or even the
way they use hardware to drive down paper reliance and the millions of reams of orphaned
printouts sitting forgotten in law firms around the world.
Bringing it together
So there is it – an article which hardly mentioned cloud, robots taking over or the end of law
as we know it. But do not think for a second that complacency is the answer to long-term
survival as it clearly is not. Firms just need to move beyond ticking technology boxes and
genuinely analyse the ways in which they work and how they can improve with specific
The Australasian Law Management Journal is produced by the Australian Law Management Group
of the Legal Practice Section of the Law Council of Australia
www.lawcouncil.asn.au/almj
application of technology. Is it just about security, collaboration, lawyer productivity,
learning and hardware? No, but firms certainly will not go wrong if they start with them.
Mark Andrews is Regional IT Director – Asia Pacific and Australia at Baker & McKenzie. He
has a varied background, including time in the public and private sectors, along with
considerable professional services experience. He has held roles ranging from HR to
management consulting and has previously been a guest lecturer as part of University of
Technology, Sydney’s Executive MBA program.
The Australasian Law Management Journal is produced by the Australian Law Management Group
of the Legal Practice Section of the Law Council of Australia
www.lawcouncil.asn.au/almj