Category: Technology

Change, technology and people

Mark Gould1 Comment

A long time ago, I argued that social technologies make most difference when they start by meeting real needs that people have. I still think that is true, and I am beginning to wonder if the same is true for other types of technology too. A few things over the past week have brought some threads together for me.

Gibson Mill at Hardcastle CragsJoanna Goodman wrote a very good overview of the state of legal IT and innovation in the Law Society Gazette. Embedded in the middle of the article was this short statement:

Firms are focusing on innovation because legal IT is getting a lot of attention at the moment and they are looking for opportunities to use technology as a differentiator.

I am not so sure that technology alone can be a differentiator, except for a short time, especially as firms generally have to buy in systems and expertise (which is therefore likely to be available to everyone else on the same terms). When firms mix technology with something unique that they have (the knowledge of their people, for example) then there is a possibility of differentiation. I posted a couple of tweets suggesting my reservations (within the scope of 140 characters.

There followed a very interesting discussion about the need to consider technology and cultural issues in innovation, sparked also by a couple of observations by Charles Christian. (The whole thing can be seen on Storify.) In the end, I was persuaded by Joanna’s argument that technology is too important (and moving at too fast a pace) to be left to one side while firms deal with people and cultural issues.

Today, two excellent blog posts have made me return to the question of the balance between people and technology.

Julian Summerhayes, writing about “the broken law firm”, suggests that firms have never been particularly good at considering people issues:

As someone who’s worked in the business a long time, I’ve witnessed countless changes. Mostly these have been technologically driven. But what I’ve not witnessed is any attention being paid to the soft stuff. At this stage I’m reminded of what Tom Peters has been banging on about for about 40 years: Hard is Soft. Soft is Hard. In other words, focusing on the numbers is easy. The other 101 soft stuff is the really, really hard part of running a law firm (or any business).

Julian is not just concerned about innovation, but his point is particularly valid in that context. How many firms focus on improving processes or on taking advantage of the latest technology in the belief that these are hard options, when the really meaningful work consists in nurturing people (employees and clients)?

Anne Marie McEwan comes at the question from a slightly different, but no less interesting, angle. She has been developing a new approach to workplace learning that she has called Tiny Triumphs, and has written a long post on LinkedIn describing why it is important. (The post was first published last week, but Anne Marie substantially updated it today.)

Tiny Triumphs has a deceptively simple structure:

Eight themes and associated topics are explored across three phases:

  • Diagnose workplace context (what’s happening)?
  • Select, scope and plan a small workplace project – do it!
  • What happened? What next?

What sets Anne Marie’s work apart from other approaches to developing skills is the fact that she puts people and their social interactions at the heart of work, and this principle then drives the learning experience:

…business processes are socially-generated through people, their relationships and inter-actions. These dynamic social processes are emergent (they emerge from what people do together) and they are complex – the people who generate them are diverse, connected, inter-dependent and adaptive.

I prefer self-organising to adaptive. People are not robots. Despite prescribed rules and sanctions for deviating from them, people decide the extent to which they will comply. They self-organise, acting alone (influencing / coercing others) and together in ways that may or may not be in line with what’s expected of them. It is therefore important to have some knowledge of topics like power, cultures (national, organisational, professional, demographic), collaboration, conflict, and how taking personal responsibility and organisational values-in-action encourage humane behaviour.

Anne Marie takes a similar approach to understanding customer-facing workflows — meeting (often undefined) customer expectations through the “outcome of relationships among people, their capabilities and how they interact” — and to workforce needs:

…work is changing. Operational roles are expanding and becoming more socially, technically and organisationally complex. What sort of pressures, for example, might fast-paced, collaborative, relationship-focused demands create for people? What might the issues be where knowledge is new, perhaps abstract and emerges from cross-boundary, cross-cultural conversations.

The issues that Julian and Anne Marie raise brought be back to the technology vs culture discussion I had last week. I am still persuaded that the future for law firms must involve advances in technology. (Those who hold out will become as rare as modern hand-weavers, compared to the successors of the 18th-century developments in weaving technologies.)

But, law is still an inherently people-centred business. As such, technological development needs to proceed with people in mind. When innovation is led by technology, and by people who promote technology without considering its impact on people, it is less likely to succeed than if change is driven by and depends on the interests of real clients, employees and others inside and outside the firm.

The unknown future of technology

Mark Gould1 Comment

Last week saw the fortieth anniversary of the first commercial passenger-carrying Concorde flight, as highlighted in this tweet by Aviation Week:

Concorde was probably the most well-known product of Harold Wilson’s government’s high-profile science and technology policy during the 1960s. (Strictly speaking, the joint Franco-British project started under the preceding Conservative governments, but much of the work was done under Labour.) That policy was announced in a speech in 1963, whose concluding passages included the following fateful words:

The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this [scientific] revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry. We shall need a totally new attitude to the problems of apprenticeship, of training and re-training for skill.

“The white heat of technology” became a watchword for the Labour governments of 1964-1970. Looking back, it might also be seen as a kind of curse. Some of the highest-profile advances of this era had little lasting impact, or were undone in later years by the kind of outmoded methods and practices that Wilson said should be rejected.

Concorde was one of those disappointments. The development and production of a supersonic aircraft was an incredible achievement, but it was only purchased by the national carriers of France and Britain. Other airlines conducted evaluations, and some went as far as placing orders. All the orders were cancelled over time. Concorde remained in service with British Airways and Air France until late 2003 when it was withdrawn by both airlines, due to low passenger numbers and rising maintenance costs.

Concorde’s purpose was purely to carry passengers faster than other aircraft. This purpose was shared on the sea by another 1960s technology: the hovercraft. Just as Concorde cut the time for Atlantic air crossings, the SR.N4 hovercraft operated by Seaspeed, Hoverlloyd and (after their merger) Hoverspeed allowed passengers to cross the English Channel in a fraction of the time taken by traditional ferries.

In the end, though, not enough people wanted to pay the premium to save on their travel time. The hovercraft service between England and France ran for just over thirty years — from 1968 until 2000. The cost of fuel ultimately made the service uneconomic — especially once cross-Channel duty-free sales were outlawed (like many forms of transport, traditional retail opportunities had subsidised the core service).

The real problem for the hovercraft and for Concorde was that they prioritised the wrong thing. Whilst their progenitors (including the British government, which subsidised both projects either directly or through its management of the transport operators) concentrated on speed, travel became a volume business. As foreign travel became more common, it would be more important for operators to have craft that could service as many passengers as possible. Since the high-speed options tended to have limited capacity, they were much less attractive.

As a result, Concorde was much less successful than the Boeing 747. The latter plane was developed at about the same time, but was far more capacious and flexible in operation. Concorde could only carry a maximum of 120 passengers, whilst the smallest 747 variant carried 480 people. The 747 was also capable of longer flights. Unsurprisingly, the Boeing remains in production (albeit in updated form).

On sea, a similar pattern emerged. Whilst hovercraft services operated, the traditional ferries stayed in service. Although slower, the ferries carried 3-4 times as many passengers and cars.  It wasn’t until the Channel Tunnel opened in late 1994 with a high-speed high-volume service that the sea-borne craft of all types were properly threatened.

This stark retelling of the history of Concorde and the cross-Channel hovercraft would suggest that those investments were a complete waste — the only return was 30-40 years of high-speed travel for a small minority of travellers. But there were other benefits. The most obvious is that the Anglo-French cooperation in developing Concorde was the foundation for the Airbus consortium, which is now the main competitor to Boeing in the production of large passenger and cargo aircraft. Hovercraft technology is not dead — in a modified form, it persists in surface-effect ships such as Norway’s Skjold-class corvettes.

The outcome of these experiments could not have been foreseen. That they were not commercially successful is not a reason for suggesting that they were misconceived from the outset. Their failure arose from changes in the market (the behaviour of the travelling public and the global oil market) as well as governmental action (liberalisation of air and shipping services on both sides of the Atlantic and the Channel, together with closer European integration). I am certain that almost nobody could have predicted the result of this combination of factors, even if they had foreseen each alone. In the end, though, very few unsuccessful ventures produce absolutely nothing of value at all.

And that is where I draw a link with current technology developments in the law. As I have mentioned before, the technologies of the future are not necessarily the ones we predict in the present. That said, there is an incredible amount of technological change and experimentation in legal services at the moment. Some of those experiments will be as successful as the Boeing 747 — changing the way people use the law across the world. Some will be as exciting as the hovercraft for a while, but will ultimately be beached for reasons that are currently unforeseeable.

There are a few important things to bear in mind during this period of novelty.

Experimentation is necessary, which means that some things won’t work out quite as intended. Firms that stick to what they know might be lucky to survive, but they may still be overtaken by those that experiment and fail.

It is possible to try more than one experiment. Unlike other professional services firms, law firms struggle to diversify in the services that they offer — few stray beyond the law — but they can try different ways of working.

Don’t forget the people factor. At a technology level, Concorde and the large hovercraft were a success. They delivered exactly what was promised — fast, safe travel. But they didn’t serve people in the way they wanted. The market chose something different. Likewise, law firms’ may create technology-based services that are successful in their own terms, but fail to appeal to people for some reason. Projects that are driven by technologists (in the broadest sense of the term) are more likely to forget to consider how people (lawyers, clients, regulators, and others) might react.

What is going on elsewhere? This is crucial. The lessons learned from Concorde resonate beyond the companies and teams directly involved in that project. On the other hand, had those people paid closer attention to the development of the package holiday and the work being done in other areas of the aircraft industry, they might have decided to cut their losses much earlier than they did. Likewise, law firms need to be aware of how other firms’ experiments are progressing. Just as businesses need to avoid reinventing their own wheels, they should try not to repeat other people’s mistakes but build on their successes instead.

Three steps to the future

Mark Gould1 Comment

In the last two blog posts, I looked at the limits on improving productivity compared to growth, and suggested that real changes in yield come with improved working practices and products or services that do not depend on contemporaneous fee-earner input. Coincidentally, yesterday I saw a very good explanation of the issue (defined as ‘the problem of constant cost’) in a guest post by Michael Mills of Neota Logic on the Beaton Capital blog.

…quantity in legal services is not necessarily a good thing. We have the diseconomies of scale—internal coordination costs, quality variation—but not enough of the economies, other than branding and cross-selling (when it works).

In short, law practice missed the industrial revolution. We didn’t build power looms, and we certainly didn’t build Jaquard looms, programmed by holes in paper cards (the model for the 80-column, cropped-corner punch cards of computing’s adolescence).

Forget about billable hours, alternative fees, and ABS’s. The problem is constant cost.

Neota Logic’s systems are good examples of the kind of thing I described in my last post — a combination of knowledge and technology increasing law firm productivity. This and systems like it are an inevitable future for firms. The problem, I think, is not in creating these new ways of working, but in ensuring that when they are developed that they flow into the firm as well as possible. How, in other words, does the innovative become the norm?

New embedded in old at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

As technology teams have faced this problem for longer, it is not surprising that a model has been created to describe how an IT function might be structured to allow it to deliver new things while continuing to support existing products and services. Gartner has invented ‘bi-modal IT’:

the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and the other on agility. Mode 1 is traditional and sequential, emphasizing safety and accuracy. Mode 2 is exploratory and nonlinear, emphasizing agility and speed.

But these are two complete opposites, and the gap between them is cavernous. Unsurprisingly, things can fall into the cavern and never escape. Simon Wardley (whom we have met before) is scathing about Gartner’s idea:

I couldn’t stop howling with laughter. It’s basically 2004 dressed up as 2014 and it is guaranteed to get you into a mess.

Wardley’s alternative is a system with three parts rather than two.

When it comes to organising then each component not only needs different aptitudes (e.g. engineering + design) but also different attitudes (i.e. engineering in genesis is not the same as engineering in industrialised). To solve this, you end up implementing a “trimodal” (three party) structure such as pioneers, settlers and town planners which is governed by a process of theft.

The three roles are summarised neatly in this diagram (taken from Wardley’s blog under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License).

map

The bi-modal model advocated by Gartner only considers the two extremes — pioneers and town planners. Filling the gap with a specified role or function helps to prevent the work of the pioneers being rejected by town planners for being undeveloped. As Wardley puts it:

The problem with bimodal (e.g. pioneers and town planners) is it lacks the middle component (the settlers) which performs an essential function in ensuring that work is taken from the pioneers and turned into mature products before the town planners can turn this into industrialised commodities or utility services. Without this middle component then yes you cover the two extremes (e.g. agile vs six sigma) but new things built never progress or evolve. You have nothing managing the ‘flow’ from one extreme to another.

(In an update to his original post, Wardley adds that a similar model was identified by Robert Cringely in his history of Silicon Valley, Accidental Empires. Cringely’s model used different archetypes — commandos, infantry and police. The relevant passage is in Chapter 12 of the book, published online by Cringely in 2013.)

Whichever terminology is used, the idea is the same.

The first wave of change is the responsibility of highly expert groups who work hard and fast to create products and services that might meet particular needs. Some of these might fail, but the speed of work is such that there is always something new to work on. In established businesses, this might be a dedicated research and development function, or it might be an activity open to all (as at Google, for example, where there was an expectation that everyone could spend 20% of their time on their own ideas).

When complete, the successful experiments might have proved their worth, but that doesn’t make them ready for widespread adoption. There will inevitably be some rough edges to smooth off, and some issues that could not have been foreseen until the idea needs to be scaled up for general use. That process of perfecting a new product or service is the responsibility of the middle group (the settlers or infantry). Some ideas may fail at this stage too — an idea that works in a lab may hit obstacles when it encounters real life and work.

Once a product or service has been proved worthy of inclusion as part of the core business, it still needs to be maintained and developed. That is the responsibility of the third group —  the town planners or police. As their archetypes suggest, this group needs to ensure such things as stability, good governance, predictability and reliability. But their work is not immune from disruption — as Simon Wardley’s diagram shows (click to embiggen):

trimodal

Wardley’s model was designed with technology development in mind, and with the benefit of his extensive experience running successful technology companies. However, I think it is also a valuable template for development more generally in law firms (and probably elsewhere).

As an example, knowledge teams in law firms are now an established concept. They commonly work in similar ways when dealing with established aspects of legal practice. The fact that there is a lively market in Professional Support Lawyers between firms, and that many firms have created career pathways for those teams, suggests that this is a ‘town planner’ type of function. But that was not always the case. The first PSLs were experimental. They created their own roles: trying different ways of working, some of which were successful and some weren’t (the pioneer phase). As  firms became more familiar with the concept, they jumped on the bandwagon, perfecting the role in different practice groups and in different types of firm (the settler phase).

The same process can be seen at play in the way firms are adopting concepts like process-mapping and project management. Here, though, the pioneer phase can be massively foreshortened since these are concepts that have been tried and tested in different sectors before finding their way into the law.

Policing and town planning need to change when the context changes. Established knowledge functions need to pay attention to new ideas thrown up by pioneers. That message is at the heart of a recent call by David Griffiths for knowledge and HR functions to start disrupting themselves. When they do, they should consider how the three stages of development might be adapted to their situation.

Firms that cannot identify their pioneers need to consider where new ideas are going to come from. (Without those new ideas, the market will move on without them.) If they can point to a group of pioneers, but they expect ideas from that group to become part of ‘business as usual’ without additional work, they risk failure and frustration with the whole process. The latter situation is probably as bad as having no new ideas in the first place.

As usual, if you are keen to work out how these archetypes of development might work in your firm, we should talk.

Knowledge-sharing cars

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I am ambivalent about the current efforts being expended by Google and others on autonomous vehicles. As a society we appear to have backed ourselves into a corner where the only way out is to shift a ton of metal alongside driver and passengers. Self-driving cars don’t do much to change this, and hand-wringing articles about how the trolley problem might be resolved by autonomous vehicles are a distraction.

Nonetheless, it appears that the efforts of Google and others will produce self-driving vehicles for the mass market, so it is interesting to look at the work they are doing. Google has been particularly forthcoming about their research, as shown in this TED talk by Chris Urmson, who has headed up Google’s self-driving car programme since 2009.

There is a lot of interesting information here about what Google is doing with its cars and how they are coping with real-world traffic situations. He is particularly persuasive on the safety point — human beings are responsible for many more accidents resulting in death or serious injury. If the future of transportation has to involve cars, far better that those cars are not driven by distracted and borderline incompetent human beings.

But the point I found most intriguing comes when we are introduced to the way Google’s car sees the world. (This runs from about 7’48” in the video.)

The starting point, basic driving on grade-separated highways, centres on perception (where the car sees itself and the other road-users in the world) and experience (what has happened before that might happen again). This is roughly where Google were when they started serious work in 2009. (What Chris Urmson calls “a geometric view of the world.”)

Once Google moved the cars onto city streets, there was immediately much more complex information to handle. The cars needed to be aware of objects other than other vehicles — pedestrians, animals, road works, litter, and so on. At this point, the cars need to be able to deal with a range of different signals — flashing lights on police vehicles or school buses, for example. They also need to judge and work around the behavioural expectations of other road users at a host of different levels — some signalled and some implicit. At 10’09”, Urmson tells us the key to their success in this effort:

The way we accomplish this is by sharing data between the vehicles.

At first this is just sharing information about the location of hazards like road works between vehicles, so that their shared understanding of the environment is constantly updated. Over time, this has developed into a massive shared database of all of the things that all of the cars have seen over time. Hundreds of thousands of objects have been observed by the cars in multiple dimensions. All these objects (cars, people, animals, cars, trucks, cyclists…) can be used by Google’s cars later on to help them understand novel objects and situations by comparison with what has already been seen and recorded. Further than that, this data can be used to build a model of how different objects might behave in the world — improving the predictive capability of the fleet immeasurably.

Google’s cars will always be better than humans in terms of their capacity for observation, speed of reaction and ability to deal with crises calmly and decisively. Urmson shows in detail how this is achieved even when a hazard is partly concealed by other traffic in the section of video from 12’30” to 13’24”. That gives them an edge as individuals. Their constant sharing of data is where the real differentiation occurs. They are constantly learning by sharing.

Humans will never have the processing capabilities of an autonomous car. But there will always be somethings that we can do immeasurably better than technology. The key to future success is working out what those things are and concentrating on them. But we can also learn from Google’s cars. By sharing what we know as widely as possible and actively using what is shared with us, we can develop a better picture of the world and act within it.

Your knowledge-sharing capability is almost certainly nowhere near as good as a dumb car. But the car can show you why you should be better at it. Google’s cars understand that more can be achieved by sharing than by hoarding. We should learn the same.

Why your foundations matter

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No visible means of support

A couple of weeks ago, I challenged firms to think about what might be possible without resorting to technology. That post was based on an assumption about the nature of most law firms:

The tools, systems and attitudes of technology have to be imported into traditional law firms, therefore they are available to everyone without preference. (The status of technology within the firm is a relevant issue here, but I want to leave that for another time.)

This is that other time.

Every business is constructed around a core set of assumptions. Those assumptions include:

  • Purpose — why does this business exist?
  • Beneficiaries — for whom does the business exist?
  • Platform — what is the business built on?

The answers to these (and other) questions define the nature of the enterprise. Often they are unspoken, but generally there can only be one answer. A business might pretend to serve stockholders and customers alike, for example, but in extremis a choice has to be made between them. One group has to be favoured over the other.

No visible means of supportI want to look more closely at the third of these questions, especially in the context of legal businesses.

The traditional law firm could have a range of purposes, although some manage by committing vaguely to helping businesses and individuals with legal problems. The firm may exist to make a profit for its partners, or it may prioritise client service above partner remuneration. Most, however, are founded on delivering services using people with legal knowledge and experience. That is their platform. If you were to replace all the lawyers with different people, the firm would be a very different entity. That isn’t a likely occurrence, but firms that lose significant partners and other senior lawyers do collapse. We can see this also in the legal directories — The Legal 500 and Chambers and Partners compilations rank firms and lawyers.

It is instructive to look to a different sector for comparisons. In the car industry, a volume manufacturer may have some key personnel, but they are rarely crucial to the final product. Ford may have a carefully expressed design language, but the success of its cars depends more on the reliability and dependability engineered into them in the company’s massively automated production lines. Ford’s platform is a technological one — its people are much less important than technology in the final product.

Not all cars are the same — Rolls-Royce and Bentley depend on craftsmen to produce the finishing touches that mark their vehicles out amongst luxury vehicles. Without them, the product would have much less value in the market. The platform could also be a mixed one. There are high-end motor manufacturers like McLaren and Porsche where designers and high technology (such as composites and advanced gluing techniques) are both critical to the product.

Most law firms are more similar to Rolls-Royce and Bentley in that their platform depends on key individuals and a continuation of experience and craft. Those firms need to contend with the fact that the market values that approach to legal service much less than it used to.

Some of the new entrants into the legal market have done so with a completely different platform. Riverview Law is one of the most forward-thinking in this regard. They make it clear from the front page of their website that technology is at the heart of their work:

One of the key themes that differentiates us is the way we use dashboards, management information, analytics and visualisations to help in-house legal and related teams to make better and quicker decisions, manage risk, and evolve their operating models.

They even offer their technology to in-house legal teams.

I am sure the people at Riverview are really good at what they do, but it seems clear to me as an outside observer that the platform for the business is technology. The technology allows Riverview to provide a service that stands apart from what other legal businesses do. The people might come and go, but losing the technology would fundamentally change the nature of the business. No traditional law firm could say the same.

Another firm that depends on a technology platform is Inksters in Scotland. Brian Inkster and his colleagues have created a business around a set of cloud-based services that allows them to serve clients extremely effectively from any location. This mobility and flexibility sets them apart from other firms. The firm specialises in crofting law and other legal services for the widely-scattered and remote communities of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, so their clients find it harder than most to get to a lawyer’s office. Inksters has offices, but they also have a ‘Flying Solicitor’ service, and they have provided ‘pop-up’ legal services in a wide range of different locations.

If Riverview Law is the legal equivalent of Ford, Inksters is more similar to the likes of McLaren or Porsche — using a blend of expertise and technology as the basis for a firm that can react quickly to legal need whatever the location. Both Riverview and Inksters depend on technology for their success, but Inksters has also stirred in a larger dose of legal expertise to create a unique recipe.

Riverview and Inksters are just two examples of new legal businesses built on technology foundations. There are others, and there will be more. That isn’t to say that all successful legal businesses must have such a foundation, but it is an indication of where growth will happen.

The problem for existing law firms is that they already have non-technology foundations — and you can only build on one platform. Most have bolted technology onto the work that they do, but there are limits to that approach. Some are starting to shift their work so that they can use technology in a much more fundamental way — DWF is a good example here. Over time, that technology could become so embedded in the way the firm works that it is considered part of the foundation. That is likely to be a long painful process, especially in a business where consensual decision-making is the norm.

Another approach would be to construct a new firm alongside the old one. The old firm could continue the traditional partnership, people-based model, whilst the new one made the most of new technologies and corporate structures. Over time, one would succeed (and it might not be the one with the technology foundation). For most traditional firms, this would be completely counter-cultural. Would clients care about that, or would they just gravitate to the legal service providers that best meet their needs?

Maybe it’s time for firms to start experimenting a bit more.

What if technology isn’t the answer?

Mark Gould1 Comment

Most of the current thinking about the future of law firms (and other legal activities) turns on the use of technology. Richard Susskind has been in the vanguard, and the accuracy of his predictions has drawn law firms and technology suppliers alike to the same conclusions — improvements in the practice of law and client service in the future will depend heavily on technology.

I agree. Any firm that isn’t making technology investments is drastically reducing its chances of survival.

Old and new techBut that only means that enhancing legal practice with technology has become the norm — table stakes. Clients and potential recruits will increasingly shun those firms without effective technology. (And by ‘technology’ I mean not just IT systems, but also the improved practices and processes that come from a more structured approach to legal practice. Technology is as much a mindset as it is a collection of algorithms and data.)

If technology investment is unavoidable, everyone will end up in the same place once the fuss has died down. Apart from minor adjustments in position between firms (differences in the rate of adoption, for example), the rising tide of technology will lift everyone to practically the same degree. The tools, systems and attitudes of technology have to be imported into traditional law firms, therefore they are available to everyone without preference. (The status of technology within the firm is a relevant issue here, but I want to leave that for another time.) If one firm sees something that another firm has, in many cases it is not difficult to acquire it.

That situation is great for suppliers (especially those, like HighQ, that have a product which becomes the default tool for a particular purpose) and for clients (who can start to rely on firms to improve their service through the use of technology), but it may be a problem for firms. If everything you can have is also available to everyone else, how can you stand out from the crowd?

A few firms will have the first-mover advantage, but this is probably minimal (given the stickiness of clients) and brief (given that few developments are truly bespoke).

In order to find something that truly differentiates them, firms need to ignore the commonplace of technology. By assuming that there is no technology solution, they become freer to consider possibilities that might be truly novel and useful to clients.

It is commonly suggested that there is no real difference between firms. It may appear that way from the outside, but every firm is unique. It has a unique collection of individuals within it. It has a unique collection of clients (each of whom is also unique). It has a unique history, and a unique place in the present. But very few firms make good use of their uniqueness (which is why they appear so similar to observers).

Every firm has the capability to stand out by making good use of the knowledge that is uniquely contained within it.

Everyone in the firm has a partial and unique insight into:

  • The firm itself;
  • The people within the firm;
  • Their relationships with each other, and outwith the firm;
  • The firm’s market;
  • Clients and their behaviour;
  • Clients’ markets;
  • Working practices (in all sorts of businesses);
  • The law;
  • Technology and other pervasive changes in the world;
  • And so on…

Gathering these insights from across the firm can only help the leadership team see new possibilities for action that is uniquely fitted to the firm.

This has to be done carefully. Some popular methods (such as brainstorming, amongst others) may be less effective than they appear to be because of factors such as:

By using techniques to foster openness, dissent and diversity, coupled with simple constraints and support for emergent ideas, firms can start to make sense of their unique position in the world and then act accordingly.

If your firm is interested in finding its own way, or at least in knowing more about what might be possible, you know the drill: get in touch.

People, technology, location: where should law firms’ money go?

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Experimental archaeology is a favourite way for TV documentaries to bring the past to life for the casual viewer. The BBC is currently showing a new series looking at the construction of a 13th century castle, together with various other related mediaeval activities. In last night’s episode, the team made a crossbow and its bolt using only techniques and materials available in the 1200s. In the commentary, they kept returning to the fact that a crossbow allowed armies to be effective with much less training (one presenter gleefully told how Richard I had been killed in 1199 by a crossbow fired by a mere boy).

Horse and cattle trough in SmithfieldBy concentrating on the saving on training that the crossbow brought, above the longbow, the programme missed an opportunity to make a wider point about the impact of technology on warfare — it changes the way money is spent.

If your army depends on archers wielding longbows, you need to invest heavily in training (and in the peripheral expenses to maintain archers in training). However, a longbow was probably slightly cheaper to produce than a crossbow, which needed components wrought from iron (not a cheap resource by comparison with wood at the time). So, as crossbows become more widely used, it is likely that the budget for archers would shift from supporting training to the new technology.

This is part of a pattern over hundreds of years. The wars of the twentieth century were probably the last in which the size of an army or navy played a part in determining the outcome (directly or indirectly). Modern warfare is waged with small numbers of people and huge amounts of costly technology. (Sadly, the impact on humanity is just as devastating — possibly more so, as civilians become harder to distinguish from combatants.)

Longbows and crossbows are still capable of causing death and serious injury. Nothing has made them less deadly, but their power is meaningless in the context of modern warfare.

Law firms are in a similar position today.

For the past few centuries, the primary cost for a firm has been lawyers and their training and upkeep. In more recent times, larger firms have also spent large sums on acquiring and maintaining high-quality offices in expensive business locations. As salaries and rents increase, clients have ultimately had to bear the cost in higher fees.

Technologies that are now readily available (or in development) are starting to eat away at the traditional model. They cost more than the basic IT tools already in use (typically email and document processing and management). It is a reasonable assumption that a firm of the future will spend a much higher proportion of its budget on technology than it did in the past, and a lower proportion on people (some of their functions being done automatically) and offices (as people work much more flexibly, using mobile devices and in non-firm locations).

So it is interesting to read in the Legal Support Network’s Legal IT Landscapes 2015 report that the top 100 UK firms are not investing hugely on their IT:

Our results show that top 100 firms spend on average 4.1% of revenue on IT (there were some that spent 8-10%, so you can imagine the other numbers). Though this metric isn’t one I’d use alone, and it puts law firms squarely alongside other professional services businesses (according to Gartner), many would say that legal businesses should be spending more, to innovate and build competitiveness. Let me put that 4.1% figure in context, too: education, media and entertainment, and banking and financial services all spend more – banking’s spend on IT as a percentage of revenue is 6.3%.

The top 100 firms are facing competition from a range of new entrants. Some are offering technology directly to legal consumers. Some have created businesses based on a different model — different in terms of office use, people employed, and technology developed. They are almost certainly all spending significantly more than 4.1% of revenue on technology — some may surpass 10%.

The future of law will involve more technology. There is no doubt about that. Some artisan law firms will continue to exist, but the bulk of legal work will be done in businesses founded on technology platforms that go beyond word processing and email. Interestingly, many firms are working alongside the new entrants in the development of new ways of working. As Simon Wardley points out in a post describing the commoditisation of part of the entertainment media, doing so betrays a completely inadequate strategy.

Such a deliberate move by a commissioning company – the chess equivalent of Fool’s mate – should never work but it does, in industry after industry. Yes, I am saying that companies often support the commoditisation of an underlying component or constraint without realising this will reduce barriers of entry into their field and ultimately commoditise them. Companies seem to act thinking of the short term with no understanding of the impacts to themselves.

Most of the problem appears to be that companies cannot see the environment (i.e. they have no map) and aren’t used to any actual form of strategic play. To be honest, this is like stealing candy from a baby except the candy is worth millions or billions. What is really frightening, is it takes a couple of hours to map out and work out such a play. There is no way on earth you should be able to get away with this and I’m afraid it gets worse.

So, incumbent law firms should be investing more in technology, but they should also do so more strategically — armed with a really good understanding of the terrain they are fighting on. If they don’t, they become as useful as the water-trough pictured at the top of this post — fit only for decoration.

A tale of two peelers: getting the tools right

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Our household batterie de cuisine covers most normal eventualities, with plenty of pots, pans and utensils. We even have three corkscrews, which will be useful if there is ever a vinous emergency. One duplication is particularly interesting, and provides a metaphor for the knowledge and collaboration tools provided by law firms or other organisations.

2014-10-09 19.11.51We have two peelers.

I am sure this isn’t surprising in itself (after all, we have three corkscrews). However, the reason why we have two peelers is interesting. My wife and I have strongly-held and divergent views on the utility of each peeler. She hates the one I prefer, and I cannot use her favourite to peel effectively.

So we both use different tools to produce the same outcome — peeled vegetables. Such a clarity of outcome is not always possible in complex organisations, but I think it is worth striving for. Without it, one can easily be sidetracked into shiny new toys whose purpose is not really clear.

Having settled on a desired outcome, one needs to work out how best to achieve it. In our household there was no consensus on this. Fortunately, peelers are inexpensive enough to be able to acquire different types to satisfy everyone.

Even in more expensive situations, I think it is important to do everything possible to meet different needs when adopting new organisational tools and processes. When I look at some firms who have invested significant amounts in knowledge or collaboration tools that are rarely used, the cause is usually either a poorly defined outcome (what is this thing for, and does the average employee care about that?) or a failure to understand how people work and how that might be enhanced by the new system.

This was highlighted (again) by a tweet from today’s Enterprise 2.0 Summit in London:

‘Small pieces loosely joined’ was at the heart of many early uses of social tools within organisations. It is an approach that allows people to choose the approach that fits them and their desired outcome best. When the organisation chooses which outcomes to favour, and implements a one-size-fits-all tool, it is almost inevitable that half or more of the people who would have used it are put off by something that doesn’t work for them. As a result, it is much less likely that the desired outcome can actually be delivered.

It is still possible for organisations to find the right tools for people to use — big platforms are not the only approach. If you are interested in giving your people the peelers that they will use, I can help — please get in touch.

Legal technology, practice, theory and justice

Mark GouldLeave a comment

Like all other areas of life and work, the law has been changed immeasurably by technology. This will doubtless continue, but I am unconvinced by the most excited advocates of legal technology.

The impact of technology has been felt at a variety of levels. The last 35-40 years has changed the way practitioners approach all aspects of their work. Likewise, the changes wrought by technology on personal, social and commercial behaviour and activities have driven changes in the law itself.

Clouds round the tower of lawThese trends will doubtless continue, but predicting the actual changes that they will bring is a fool’s errand.

I recently wrote an article in Legal IT Today, arguing that the most extreme predictions of the capability of legal artificial intelligence would struggle to match the abductive reasoning inherent in creative legal work. In addition to that argument, I am less confident than some about the limits of technological development, I suspect that the economics of legal IT are not straightforward, and I have a deeper concern that there is little engagement between the legal IT community and generations of legal philosophy.

Limits of technology

One of the touchstones of any technology future-gazing (in any field, not just the law) is a reference to Moore’s Law. I am less certain than the futurologists that we should expect to see the doubling of capacity for ever more. If nothing else, exponential growth cannot continue for ever.

…in the real world, any simple model that shows a continuing increase will run into a real physical limit. And if it is an exponentially increasing curve that we are forecasting, that limit is going to come sooner rather than later.

What could stop computing power from increasing exponentially? A range of things — the size of the components on a chip may have a natural limit, or the materials that are used could start to become scarce.

More interestingly, from the perspective of legal business, the undoubted growth of technology over recent years has not necessarily produced efficiencies in the law, if we use lawyer busyness as a proxy for efficiency. There are far more people employed in the law now than 40 years ago, and they appear to work longer hours. Improved computing capability has produced all sorts of new problems that demand novel business practices to resolve them. (One of these being knowledge management.)

Nonetheless, it is still possible that future developments will actually be capable of taking on significant aspects of work that is currently done by people. The past is not necessarily a good predictor of the future.

The business challenge

There is currently a lot of interest in the possibility that IBM’s Watson will introduce a new era of legal expert systems. Earlier this month Paul Lippe and Daniel Martin Katz provided “10 predictions about how IBM’s Watson will impact the legal profession” in the ABA Journal. Bruce MacEwen has also asked “Watson, I Presume?” However, one thing that marks out any reference to Watson in the law is a complete absence of hard data.

The Watson team have helpfully provided a press release summarising the systems currently available or under development. Looking at these, a couple of things strike me. The most obvious is that there are none in the law. There are medical and veterinary applications, and some in retail and travel planning. There are applications that enhance existing IT capability (typically in the area of search and retrieval). But there are none in the law.  The generic applications could be certainly be used to enhance legal IT, but there is no indication of how effective they might be compared to existing tools. And, most crucially, it is unclear how costly Watson solutions might be. That is where legal IT often struggles.

The business economics of legal technology can be difficult. Medical and veterinary systems have a huge scale advantage — human or animal physiology changes little across the globe, and pharmaceutical effectiveness does not depend significantly on where drugs are administered. By contrast, legal and political systems differ hugely, so that ready-made legal technology often needs to be tailored to fit different jurisdictions. Law firms tend to be small compared to some other areas of professional services and the demands of ethical and professional rules often restrict sharing of information. Those constraints can mean that it is hard for all but the largest firms with considerable volumes of appropriate types of work to justify investment in the most highly-developed forms of technology. As a consequence, I suspect few legal IT providers will be tempted to pursue Watson or similar developments until they can be convinced that a market exists for them.

Technology, justice and legal theory

My Legal IT piece was a response to an article by David Halliwell. His piece started with a reference to an aspect of Ronald Dworkin’s legal philosophy. Mine was similarly rooted in theory. This marks them out from most of the articles I have read on the future of legal IT. Given the long history of association between legal theory and academic study of IT in the law (exemplified by Richard Susskind’s early work on the use of expert systems in the law), it is disappointing to see so little critical thought about the impact of technology in the law.

As I read them, most disquisitions on legal IT are based on simple legal positivism — the law is presented as a set of rules that can be manipulated in an almost mechanical way to produce a result. By contrast, there is a deeper critique of concepts like big data in wider social discourse. A good example is provided in an essay by Moritz Hardt, “How big data is unfair”:

I’d like to refute the claim that “machine learning is fair by default”. I don’t mean to suggest that machine learning is inevitably unfair, but rather that there are powerful forces that can render decision making that depends on learning algorithms unfair. Any claim of fair decision making that does not address the technical issues that I’m about to discuss should strike you as dubious.

Hardt focuses on machine learning, but his point is true of any algorithm and probably more generally of any technology tending towards artificial intelligence. Any data set, any process defined to be applied to that data, any apparently neutral ‘thinking’ system will have inherent prejudices. Those prejudices may be innocuous or trivial, but they may not be. Ignoring the possibility that they exist runs a risk of unfairness, as Hardt puts it. In the law, unfairness manifests itself as injustice.

What concerns me is that there doesn’t appear to be a lively debate about the risk of injustice in the way legal IT might develop in the future (not to mention the use of technology with a legal impact in other areas of society). Do we have a modern equivalent of the debate between Lon Fuller and H.L.A. Hart? I am not as close to legal theory as I used to be, so it may already have taken place. If not, are we happy for the legal positivists to win this one by default? (I am not sure that I am.)

The limits of technology and law

Mark Gould1 Comment

2014-05-27 13.45.59One of the first law lectures I attended, over 30 years ago, was given by Avrom Sherr. As we all settled ourselves, full of our importance as future lawyers, Avrom walked into the lecture theatre and lay on his back on the desk at the front of the hall. The hubbub subsided and there was a moment of uncertainty (embarrassment even) before he got to his feet to start the lecture.

The point of this act of theatre, we were informed, was as follows.

In previous centuries, medical students were taught from cadavers. As a consequence, everything they learned was pathology. More recently, medical science had caught up with the idea that most people were actually healthy and that there was probably more to be understood about the workings of healthy bodies than diseased and dead ones; certainly as much that would be useful to those charged with the care of the living.

Legal studies, Avrom argued, had a similar problem. By studying the pathology of the law (as found in centuries of case law), the real life of the law was lost. His impersonation of a cadaver was intended to remind us that although dissection of cases (like anatomy lessons) had a purpose in learning about law, we should not forget that the vast majority of legal actions (making contracts, administrative decision-making, etc) would never be even be the subject of litigation, let alone a reported case.

I was reminded of this experience, and the valuable lesson, by a short article in The Lawyer by Peter Kalis (chairman and global managing partner, K&L Gates), “Lawyers as robotic bores? It’s not the English way”. Mr Kalis will be writing a series of articles, and this one sets out his stall.

In future columns I’ll supply some thoughts on our evolving industry. In this inaugural venture, however, I wish to acknowledge my debt to the English legal tradition. In other words, I come in peace.

He singles out three legal academics whose work influenced him whilst at Oxford 40 years ago: HLA Hart, Sir Otto Kahn-Freund, and Mark Freedland.

Why do Professors Hart, Kahn-Freund and Freedland matter here? Their careers nicely illustrate that law is about ideas and the ability to express them, whether in service to clients or to scholarship.

In future columns you’ll see me challenge those who regard lawyers and their firms as anachronistic and those who would reduce us to automata and algorithms. It will be my way of saying thanks to Professors Hart, Kahn-Freund and Freedland, among so many others on your side of the pond.

That description of the purpose of law — “ideas and the ability to express them” — resonates with my experience as a raw undergraduate. After four years of study at Warwick, it was clearer than than ever to me that law doesn’t exist to give opportunities to judges and law reporters. As an academic discipline it can be a kind of applied social science — a combination of psychology, ethnology, economics, politics — that may help to describe how social and individual relationships might work out in the presence or absence of power. Unlike many of those other disciplines, law also has a practical life outside the academy. Its practitioners have the privilege of being able to help mediate in those relationships — supporting or opposing power as necessary.

Over the past few years, I have kept coming back to this point about relationships in my work and on this blog. I am more sure than ever that good law, sensitively practised, depends on an understanding of the people involved. That understanding requires the kind of insight into human relationships, desires and needs, power structures, that I suspect most people develop unconsciously.

Critically, though, technology struggles with this aspect of law as lived. It sometimes appears that the most vocal technology advocates forget this. As news this week about the Turing test shows, it is too easy to be blinded by overblown claims of what computers can do. The reality is usually much more limited. In this context, also, we need to know whether a piece of legal technology deals with a pathological legal problem or the real human issue that underlies the call to law. If it doesn’t look to the latter, then it will be of severely limited use. That is not to say it will be useless, just good for some things only.