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Learning from My Students in Law 2050
My Law 2050 class has moved into group presentations (format explained here), the first round being their assessments of new companies and business models emerging in the “new normal.” In two days of presentations, so far we’ve heard about a wide variety of fascinating developments: Axiom, QuisLex, Neota, MetricStream, Yusin & Irvine, Pangea, CEB, Clerky, Onit, MyCase, and Legal Outsourcing Partners. Also, one of my students, Christine Carletta, wrote an insightful description and assessment of Lex Machina as a post on the JETLaw blog for Vanderbilt’s Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law. I couldn’t be more pleased with how the students are engaging with their projects and the class in general!
Twitter Made Me Do It! – New Legal Issues Emerging from Advances in the Science of Social Networks
Advances in neuroscience and genetics have opened up profound and difficult legal issues regarding individual behavior. For example, before her tragic death the late Jamie Grodsky published a set of stunningly good articles on the impacts of genetics science on environmental law and toxic torts, and my colleague at Vanderbilt, Owen Jones, heads a vast research project on neuroscience and the law.
But at the other end of the spectrum, rapid advances are also underway in how we understand crowd behavior, and there are legal issues waiting to boil over. Like many of the issues covered in Law 2050, these advances are the direct result of the Big Data-computation combo, in this case aimed at the science of social networks (and I’m not just talking about the NSA…uh-oh, probably by just saying that they’ll start following my posts!). Of course we all know that Big Brother and even our friends and businesses are snooping through our social media. As the International Business Times reported earlier this week, for example, insurance companies scour claimant’s social media posts at the time of the accident to detect fraud, admissions of fault, and so on. My focus here is different–it’s on how we can learn what an individual does from studying his or her social network behavior, not just what he or she communicates to it (see here for a great summary of legal issues surrounding the latter).
For example, researchers studying the equivalent of Twitter in China, Weibo, reached findings about the flow of emotions in social network suggesting that anger spreads faster than does joy. As they summarize their paper‘s findings:
Recent years have witnessed the tremendous growth of the online social media. In China, Weibo, a Twitter-like service, has attracted more than 500 million users in less than four years. Connected by online social ties, different users influence each other emotionally. We find the correlation of anger among users is significantly higher than that of joy, which indicates that angry emotion could spread more quickly and broadly in the network. While the correlation of sadness is surprisingly low and highly fluctuated. Moreover, there is a stronger sentiment correlation between a pair of users if they share more interactions. And users with larger number of friends posses more significant sentiment influence to their neighborhoods. Our findings could provide insights for modeling sentiment influence and propagation in online social networks.
It’s only a matter of time before clever lawyers start using similar techniques to inform questions of intent, motive, reputation, liability, and so on. For example, if it could be shown that a person’s social media network flared up with anger (e.g., hostile comments or rumors about a spouse) shortly before the person committed a crime, that could prove influential in determining motive. Similarly, social network analytics could be used to measure the reputation impact of alleged libel or slander, consumer confusion in trademark infringement claims, and market perceptions in shareholder derivative claims–basically, anything that involves crowd behavior. Of course, there will also be a swarm of related legal issues such as privacy, data breaches, and admissibility in legal proceedings. So, just as scientific advances at the genetic and brain level are fueling legal issues regarding the individual, so too are advances in the science of social networks likely to open up new legal issues regarding crowds as crowds as well as their impacts on individuals.
What You Get When 45 Law Students Brainstorm About Legal Futures
Last week my Law 2050 class moved into a group project phase. I’ve divided the 45 students into six groups. Each group is exploring a pair of legal future topics grouped under two themes: (1) emerging legal technologies and practice models, and (2) future legal practice scenarios. The six paired topics are:
|
Group |
Tech/Industry Theme |
Practice Scenario Theme |
|
1 |
Outsourcing |
Environment and energy |
|
2 |
Legal process management |
Social and demographic |
|
3 |
Legal risk management |
Economic and financial |
|
4 |
Routinized and expert systems |
Health and medicine |
|
5 |
Legal prediction |
Data and privacy |
|
6 |
New legal markets | Other technologies |
Each group member prepared a proposed set of specific research projects fitting the group’s topics, and last week they pitched them to their groups. Each group selected 3-4 projects for each topic. They are exploring the viability of their tech/practice model selections and of their practice development selections. Later in the semester the groups will present their findings to the class as a whole.
Last week, the groups selected their final set of research projects and gave a quick summary to the class. I was quite impressed with the breadth and depth of their selections:
Future Practice Development Topics: synthetic organs, bitcoins, robotic surgery, student loan debt relief, Cloud computing, Google glass, 3-D printing, Dodd-Frank aftermath, crowdfunding, sea level rise, cybersecurity standards, carbon sequestration, space law & asteroid mining, virtual real estate, ocean-based power sources, biometric identification, water rights issues, genetically pre-fabricated children, natural disaster law, AI decision making, majority-minority America, same sex marriage, LGBTQIA rights, mass human migration, the sharing economy.
Legal Tech and Practice Models: QuisLex, Yuson & Irvine, LPO security breach issues, rebundling of LPO functions, My Case, Onit, Clerky, Axiom, Lex Machina, Casetext, Clearspire, Lawyer Up, Jury Verdict Analyzer, Kiiac, Neota Logic, healthcare compliance software.
I’m looking forward to what they have to say about each of these!
Law’s “New Normal” as Seen Through the Eyes of Law Students
As I mentioned in my last post, my Law 2050 class recently featured two panels of speakers, one consisting of large law firm managing partners and the other of large corporation in-house counsel. I identified four major themes that struck me as dominating the discussions: (1) the improving profile of “Medium Law,” (2) the impacts of volatile lateral partner movement, (3) the in-house counsel’s quest for value, and (4) law firm financial structure as an obstacle to innovation.
I had my students–there are 45 enrolled in the class–prepare “reaction papers” for the combined panels, in which they were free to comment on what they heard however they wished. I had held off on my post until they handed in the papers so as not to influence their reactions. Remarkably, however, the four themes I discussed in my post were recurrent themes in the student papers. But there were others that dominated their discussions and which revealed something about how law students are approaching the so-called “new normal.”
- The students were struck by the different emphasis the two panels placed on quality versus efficiency in the “value” calculus. While both panels placed importance on both value components, the students perceived that the managing partners emphasized selling quality while the in-house counsel emphasized buying efficiency. The in-house counsel were fairly blunt in this respect, which made a deep impression on the students.
- The in-house counsel panel discussed the “disaggregation” theme extensively, with one panelist describing how legal matters are unbundled and farmed out to a variety of service providers. As this counsel put it, “I hire everything from $30 an hour lawyers to $1500 an hour lawyers–I find the right rate for the right service.” Although this struck the students as a sound business model, they were also struck by how much workload that places on the in-house counsel to herd all the cats. It’s like trying to be your own general contractor when building your new home. The students thus saw the potential value in Legal Project Management service providers, several of which will be appearing on panels later in the semester.
- Indeed, many of the students asked why law firms can’t essentially reinvent themselves to house all of the unbundled services under one roof and charge out each of the various services at competitive market rates. Good question! Indeed, next week we will be hearing from some firms that have taken some steps in that direction.
- Probably the most introspective and personal theme that ran through the papers had to do with training–as in how will they receive it. Let’s face it, the old model, for all its flaws now under the microscope, was a wonderful training ground for young lawyers. They got to see all the bricks in the litigation or transaction wall as it was constructed, and could observe high quality legal work all around them. My students expressed concern that they will not have that same opportunity as legal services are unbundled and farmed out to multiple providers and as their value comes under close scrutiny by clients and their own firms. Remarkably, many said they’d gladly take reduced salaries over their first few years at a firm if that meant they’d receive formalized and extensive training as the quid pro quo.
- Finally, many of the students questioned the continuing viability of US legal practice restrictions. They wondered whether large US firms can compete with the more financially liberated UK firms in the global market, and whether state licensing restrictions really have a rational basis for practice fields that are national in scope. Although the panelists opined that change on this front would be very slow to come, the vibe from the students was that it can’t come fast enough for them.
I have to say that I was quite impressed by how deeply and insightfully my students thought about these issues. Of course, their main concern is about getting employment after law school, which many of the 3Ls have already secured, but my sense is that after hearing from our two panels they have a better handle on what employment in the legal industry will be like in this era of transformation.
Insights on the “New Normal” from Law Firm Managing Partners and Corporate Counsel
Last week in my Law 2050 class we held two panels of speakers–a panel of three BigLaw managing partners on Monday (Ben Adams of Baker Donalson, Richard Hayes of Alston Bird, and Steve Mahon of Squire Sanders) followed by a panel of three in-house counsel of large corporations (Reuben Buck of Cisco, Jim Cuminale of Nielsen, and Cheryl Mason of Hospital Corp. of America). First, my enthusiastic thanks to our panelists, who provided a lively, engaging, deep, and quite candid forum for the students.
Indeed, the speakers covered so much ground I could not possibly cover it all in one or even several posts. So what rose to the top in my assessment? Four things:
- The Rise of MediumLaw. Both sets of speakers suggested that medium-sized firms (MediumLaw) are increasingly a source of competition for BigLaw and of legal services to large corporations, confirming Richard Susskind’s prediction that, while MediumLaw firms will face pressures to consolidate, they now have “an unprecedented opportunity to be recognized as credible alternatives” to BigLaw. One reason is the basic “world is flat” effect, making it easy to access legal talent everywhere. As for legal talent, all the speakers recognized that MediumLaw is brimming with top legal talent. The there is the lower fee structure a client is likely to enjoy by hiring a regional MediumLaw to handle a matter in the region. While all the corporate counsel confirmed that “bet the company” litigation or massive, complex transactional work is likely to go to BigLaw because of its repository of experience on such matters and ability to scale up to a matter of any size, there was no question that they considered MediumLaw a substantial and growing source of their legal service needs.
- The Corrosive Effect of Lateral Partner Movement: Both sets of speakers emphasized the importance, now more than ever, of establishing strong relationships between firm and client. The corporate counsel stressed the need for firms to “know my business,” and the managing partners pointed to many new kinds of practices they are taking to get there. And both panels identified the acceleration of lateral partner movement as one of the chief obstacles. Indeed, when asked what keeps them up at night, the managing partners concurred that the fallout from actual and potential partner exits is a constant source of stress (though I imagine each of the firms represented has done its share of lateral partner hiring).
- Value: The corporate counsel kept coming back to their primary concern in selecting outside counsel—value, value, value. What wasn’t as clear is how clients evaluate it and how firms are rethinking how they deliver it. For example, Cisco is well-known for using fixed fees arrangements for much of its work, but one of the corporate counsel suggested that fixed fee is not necessarily the silver bullet. If the fixed fee is simply a number that aggregates the expected revenue from an hourly billing method, how is that delivering better value? My strong sense from this representative group was that while firms and clients are willing to experiment with ways to wean off of the billable hour, there is no consensus yet on what alternative fee model will consistently deliver better value over time.
- Law Firm Financial Structure as an Obstacle to Innovation: A strong theme the managing partners panel returned to several times was how the nature of partnerships as financial entities constrains innovation. Firms manage tax consequences by flushing out profits and limiting retained earnings, which puts a disincentive on investing in R&D and makes experimenting in costly new business models or products quite risky. To be sure, the managing partners described some innovative practices–for example, one firm maintains a “venture fund” in the form of an allotment of “billable” hours groups of attorneys can apply for to free them up for practice development projects, with the firm standing behind accounting for the hours as counting every bit as much as hours actually billed to clients. As the partner from that firm explained it, that kind of practice development project is highly valuable to the firm, but not to individual lawyers if they don’t get credit for it, so they won’t do it with this kind of incentive. Yet the appetite for that kind of innovation necessarily is limited by the partnership financial profile as well, not just by the billable hour itself.
This is just a taste of the range and depth of topics our panels covered. Again, I can’t thank them enough. as for my students, I know from the “buzz” that the panels made a tremendous impression on them. They handed in their reaction papers yesterday, so I will soon learn just what that impression was!
Law 2050 (the Class) has Launched!
I am pleased to report that my Law 2050 class here at Vanderbilt Law School is now up and running. Our first two sessions last week consisted of a broad overview of the class and a brief history of the modern American law firm. The class has 45 very bright and enthusiastic students enrolled, and based on their personal statements they are keenly aware that it is to their advantage to learn more about today’s dynamic legal industry environment. Today and Tuesday we will hear from panels of managing partners and in-house counsel on their perspectives and practices. For those interested in the scope of the class, I have set out the syllabus after the jump.
Announcing Law Practice 2050 — The Vanderbilt Law School Class
I am pleased to announce that Law 2050 will move beyond the blogosphere this fall to the four walls and PowerPoint slides of a law school classroom. With the tremendous support of my dean, Chris Guthrie, I have designed Law Practice 2050, a course designed to immerse students in the dynamic environments forcing change in the law and in legal practice, the goal being to develop the skills necessary for actively participating in and taking advantage of those changes. There are four distinct but related themes embedded in the course scope:
- Understanding the structural changes taking place in the private sector legal services industry (e.g., changing firm models; new fee structures; online services; outsourcing)
- Gaining familiarity with established and emerging legal technologies (e.g., e-discovery; routinized compliance software; data aggregation and analysis)
- Exploring new kinds of legal services and employment (e.g., legal risk management; legal knowledge management; legal process management)
- Anticipating scenarios of the future of law and building skills useful for identifying and developing future practice opportunities (e.g., climate change; 3D printing; robotics; demographic shifts)
Through a series of readings (e.g., Tomorrow’s Lawyers is required reading), individual and group projects, and guest speakers and panels, we will explore the forces acting to transform the legal services industry and survey established and emerging developments. We will also explore scenarios of future social, economic, technological, and environmental change and brainstorm their possible impacts on the law. Students will engage in active small group discussions, prepare reaction papers, make group presentations, and develop practice development proposals and legal industry case studies.
I have been overwhelmed with how willing people in the industry have been to contribute to the course as speakers and panelists. Currently we have scheduled a rich variety of outside speakers including:
- a panel of managing partners of three Big Law firms
- a panel of in-house counsel of three major corporations
- a panel of representatives from several lawyer staffing firms
- a panel of representatives from legal process outsourcing firms
- a panel of associates from three Big Law firms to discuss their perspectives
- speakers from several law+tech companies
- speakers on legal process and knowledge management
- speakers from several non-law disciplines offering visions of the future of the environment, technology, and society
I will be blogging about the course as we move through it and hope to get feedback from students, academics, and practitioners. More to come…
Decomposing Compliance Counseling
One of many useful insights Richard Susskind has delivered on legal industry transformation is the idea of “decomposing” legal practice into discrete components of work, which allows one to think more clearly about how to identify opportunities to make the delivery of legal services more efficient. He aims this approach only at litigation and transactions, however, leaving out the third major domain of legal of legal practice–compliance counseling.
Compliance counseling is the neglected child in the legal practice family. Most law school course offerings emphasize litigation and transactions. Most law students decide soon into their second year that they want to do litigation or transactions. Most of the legal reinvention discourse is about litigation and transactions. But the reality is that there is a vast amount of legal work out there that is neither litigation nor transactions–it is compliance counseling. Believe me, I billed a lot of hours in this category as an environmental and land use lawyer, and there is no shortage of work like this in employee benefits, securities regulation, health care regulation, and the list goes on. It may not be as sexy as the courtroom or as glamorous as billion dollar deals, but it’s legal work so you can bet it’s going to be the target of optimization initiatives.
What is compliance counseling, and how would one “decompose” it to identify efficiency opportunities? The answer is not as clear as it is for litigation and transactions. Both litigation and transactions follow fairly standardized process paths. Litigation has its rules of procedure, and transactions center around the closing. Compliance counseling has nothing like that, and it comes in many forms. Yet, as my previous post on Neota + Littler reviewed, there clearly are opportunities to make compliance counseling more efficient, so it is worth devoting some thought to how to unpack what goes into it. (more…)
Neota + Littler = Smart Legal Innovation
There was an interesting news feed last week about “Neota Logic…collaborating with Littler Mendelson, P.C., the world’s largest employment and labor law firm representing management, to power Littler’s new Healthcare Reform Advisor. The Advisor enables Littler’s most experienced employee benefits attorneys to counsel employers on complex issues under the Affordable Care Act.” This is the kind of teaming up between innovative legal technology developers and innovative law firms that “rethink” theorists Richard Susskind and Bruce MacEwan say is a must for the survival of many segments of the legal services industry. (Note: I have no association with Neota or Littler)
Neota Logic uses proprietary technology and software to enable legal experts to “deliver knowledge in an operationally useful form as expert systems that can be consulted interactively online or embedded directly in business systems.” Littler is what MacEwan calls a “category killer” law firm–very good at one thing and not trying to be anything else. Littler’s one thing is employment law. The firm’s “single focus on employment and labor law has created a cartel of attorneys whose knowledge of and experience in these areas of law is unsurpassed. With lawyers who practice in more than 36 areas of law, there is no employment issue a company has faced that hasn’t been addressed by one of Littler’s attorneys.”
The Health Care Reform Advisor the two firms have developed allows an employer to use an online interface to upload general information about employees and benefits and receive some basic feedback about HCR impacts. Think of Turbo Tax, but this is for navigating the HCR. Sure, it’s designed to lead employers who decide they need more counsel to contact Littler, but unlike websites and blogs most firms use to do the same, this tool provides specific feedback to the user’s circumstances and educates the user about key HCR issues. It also signals that Littler knows its stuff and is in problem-solving mode.
I think of this as an example of how the term “disruptive technology,” which is hurled around liberally in “rethink” space, can misstate the case. Neota brings to the table a technology that enhances Littler–like any technology that has this potential, it’s only disruptive to the firms that don’t use it or something like it.
(My thanks to Marc Jenkins, formerly of the law firm Hubbary, Berry & Harris and e-discovery firm Hubbard & Jenkins, now with e-discovery software firm Cicayda, for alerting me to the story)
Reflections on the Good Old Days of Legal (Non)Technology
I showed up for work my first day at my law firm–then (and still) one of the largest in the world–in September 1982. I was assigned to a nice 4th floor window office overlooking Connecticut Avenue in D.C., which gave me a great view of the daily protest parades. My technology consisted of: a phone (land line–there was no other kind), a dictating machine, a wall switch to turn the lights on, and some electric sockets to plug in my desk lamp. That was it. My secretary (the term in use then) had all that plus an IBM Selectric typewriter. Virtually all research was done in the library using books. Somewhere in the library there was a dial-up Westlaw terminal and printer. Wow, we had it all.
Somehow, we managed to practice law.
A few years later we got some newfangled thing called “mag cards,” which allowed our assistants to revise documents by loading a huge stack of floppies into a slot in their IBM typewriters. Soon after that came the first computers. Our firm adopted a Wang system (Wang was one of the leading computer companies in the 1980s, then went bankrupt in 1992) with some kind of intranet e-mail network. Only staff had them–no one could imagine why the attorneys would want or need one.
Somehow, we managed to practice law.
But I wanted one of those things. (If you haven’t caught on by now, I am a tech junkie.) I had moved to the Austin office by then and was put in charge of the summer associate program (a/k/a/ party coordinator–how things change!), so I concocted a total BS story about how I needed a computer at my desk to help me do that. The firm bought it and soon after I had mine, my peers wanted one. Then I bought an IBM PS/50 for home and figured out how to hook into the firm intranet. I discovered telecommuting! One day I was exchanging e-mails with a colleague about a litigation matter and he said he would rather come down to my office to chat about it. I waited. Then the e-mail came: “Where the *&%$ are you?” Wow, were we ever wired up!
Somehow, we managed to practice law.
Law 2050 