How Lawyers Deliver Their Services to Business

January 26, 2019

Software Engineer-Turned-Attorney Suggests Replacing Law Firm’s 6-Member Team with 1 Person — Here’s What Happened (Part 3 of 3)

by Joel A. Webber

Business people care about results.

That was the biggest lesson I learned upon crossing to the client side of the lawyer / client table.

After spending a decade as a practicing attorney.

Kind of a “duh” factor for my friends who’d lived and died by the P&L all their careers.

But for a lawyer whose career had been devoted to the analytical preoccupations and time-honored how-to methodologies that occupy 99.9% of a lawyer’s education and daily focus — it was a revelation.

Until I’d shouldered executive responsibilities, I was tone-deaf to what business “results” actually were.

…

Because he began his career in software engineering, Jason Barnwell, Microsoft’s Assistant General Counsel – Legal Business, Operations and Strategy — appears to have launched his professional life with a focus on “results” akin to that of a general manager.

So — as a software engineer — it was only natural that he offered to write computer script that would enable one individual to complete all of a document creation-and-collation task to which his law firm had assigned six team members.

Just as naturally Barnwell’s law firm employers — practicing under the legal profession’s hourly billing business model — found a way to stretch out their document creation-and-collation task to six people. Presumably charging for the time of all six people — performing manually what Barnwell’s computer scripting would have automated.

January 23, 2019

Software Engineer-Turned-Attorney Suggests Replacing Law Firm’s 6-Member Team with 1 Person — Here’s What Happened (Part 2 of 3)

by Joel A. Webber

Part 1 of this three-part post described software engineer-turned-attorney Jason Barnwell’s introduction — two months into his first law job after graduating from USC Law School — to the legal profession’s idea of “productivity”.

As the junior lawyer on a deal team, he offered to automate the process of creating and collating the shareholder consents necessary to close an M&A transaction by “some basic scripting”. As he put it in an article published earlier this week: “I was still an adequate software engineer back then”.

My guess is that his skills were in fact more than “adequate” — with four years of software engineering experience in the Bay Area — and a mechanical engineering degree from MIT.

Anyway, Jason Barnwell reasoned that reducing the individual bodies required for this paper shuffling from six down to one would be a good thing. Ditto the fact that the five team members thus freed up would be able to, “focus on other aspects of the transaction rather than walking laps in an ozone filled copy room”.

He was rebuffed — without explanation. Pressing for an explanation he was again rebuffed. Undeterred, Mr. Barnwell resolved to “revisit this for the next M&A deal”.

He remained undeterred until six weeks later:

“I saw the itemized bill for the transaction … There was a line item for my contribution. My hours worked multiplied by my billable rate. My client paid a lot for me to make copies“.

…

The legal profession matter-of-factly defines “productivity” as the number of hours an attorney billed the client and then got paid for.

January 21, 2019

Software Engineer-Turned-Attorney Suggests Replacing Law Firm’s 6-Member Team with 1 Person — Here’s What Happened (Part 1 of 3)

by Joel A. Webber

This is a tale of two definitions. Two definitions of what “productivity” means in the delivery of legal services to a company.

It’s about an MIT-trained software engineer named Jason Barnwell who worked in one of the country’s major corporate law firms right out of USC Law School.

The tale begins two months into his first job with a nationally prominent corporate law firm.

Spoiler alert: In Part 2 we learn that Jason Barnwell later became — and is now — Assistant General Counsel – Legal Business, Operations & Strategy at Microsoft.

But I’m getting ahead of the story.

…

Jason Barnwell had been, “staffed as the junior-most associate on an M&A deal advising our client as they sold their business”. He was “naïve” enough — his word — to believe that automating a process in which the law firm deployed six associates and paralegals to photocopy and collate voluminous shareholder consent documents would improve the team’s productivity.

Not to mention, deliver better service to the client.

By writing some basic computer script that was part of his software engineer skill set, Mr. Barnwell’s automation solution would enable one individual to prepare all of these necessary transaction packages — thus freeing up the remaining five team members to do the other tasks needed to close the deal.

For Jason Barnwell — veteran of 4 years of software engineering — getting more done, with fewer resources, in less time, and with fewer mistakes — that all seemed fairly “productive”.

But Jason Barnwell — newly minted attorney with a mere 2 months of corporate law practice — was about to learn that his new profession had a different definition of “productivity” than what he’d been taught at MIT.

November 28, 2018

“Lawyers Can Make More Money from Vagueness and Unclear Instructions than Almost Anything Else” (Part 2 of 2)

by Joel A. Webber

In the Financial Times article which concludes with the above statement, English lawyer David Allen Green reminds the reader that the value of legal work depends on quality — not quantity:

“… To assess the value of legal advice purely on the basis of cost or volume of output is a mistake. The most valuable legal advice can be succinct, the most effective legal letter can be one page long. What businesses are paying for is expertise and security. The point of legal advice for a business is to ensure that the right protections are in place and that risks are well managed. The problem with expertise and security is that they are hard to calculate by reference to the size of outputs.”

…

November 21, 2018

Can Artificial Intelligence Move Your Attorneys Toward the Results You Care About? (Part 3 of 3)

by Joel A. Webber

In business getting “results” is basically a management question.

So is getting artificial intelligence (AI) or any other tech innovation right.

But it’s vital to begin with a management approach that can achieve those results — only thereafter does it make any sense to pick AI or any other tech innovation to reach them.

As Aileen Leventon — counselor to the legal industry and practicing attorney — put it:

“Tech is easy. Figuring out what really matters is hard.”

…

Part 1 and Part 2 of this three-part series describe the views of Dr. Richard Susskind — Scottish lawyer and Oxford PhD in computer science — on how AI can get the “results” business people need from their lawyers and other professionals — faster, cheaper, and more accurately.

Before I had read Dr. Susskind’s essay (British Academy Review’s Autumn 2018 edition), I viewed him as the leading thinker in the world on “how information technology and the Internet can improve lawyers’ effectiveness on behalf of business clients”.

But in light of his essay cited above, as covered in Parts 1 and 2, it would be more accurate to describe the aim of Dr. Susskind’s work a little differently:

Not: “How information technology and the Internet can improve lawyers’ effectiveness on behalf of business clients”.

But instead: How information technology and the Internet can improve the “results” — or the “outcomes” — that business clients want in their legal affairs.

November 19, 2018

Can Artificial Intelligence Move Your Attorneys Toward the Results You Care About? (Part 2 of 3)

by Joel A. Webber

In Part 1 of this three-part series, I wrote that business people care about results.

And that 99.9% of a lawyer’s education and focus are devoted to analytical preoccupations and time-honored how-to methodologies — “lawyer tasks” — not so much to the results their clients really care about.

Lawyers are focused on the “how” of their professional skill sets to such as extent that it obscures the “why” of their clients’ desired business outcomes.

…

Also in Part 1, I introduced Dr. Richard Susskind’s thinking on how artificial intelligence (AI) could bypass attorneys’ obsession with those “lawyer tasks” — to target results instead — what he calls “outcome-thinking”.

Here’s Dr. Susskind’s diagnosis of attorneys’ obsession with their “lawyer tasks”:

“… This kind of task-based thought is deeply flawed. Think about legal work. Commentators and practitioners often insist that much of the work of lawyers is beyond the reach of technology. They will suggest, for example, and not unreasonably, that the work of court lawyers cannot be replaced by machines. How on earth could a robot appear as an advocate before a judge? The answer, of course, is that we are light years from this happening. But the story doesn’t end here, because these traditionalists are asking and answering the wrong the question. Mistakenly, they are focusing on current ways of working rather than on whether the outcomes that court lawyers deliver might be achieved in very different ways.”

November 16, 2018

Can Artificial Intelligence Move Your Attorneys Toward the Results You Care About? (Part 1 of 3)

by Joel A. Webber

Business people care about results.

That was the biggest lesson I learned upon crossing to the client side of the lawyer / client table.

After spending a decade as a practicing attorney.

Kind of a “duh” factor for my friends who’ve lived and died by the P&L all their careers.

But for a lawyer whose career had been devoted to the analytical preoccupations and time-honored how-to methodologies that occupy 99.9% of a lawyer’s education and daily focus — it was a revelation.

Until I shouldered executive responsibilities, I was tone-deaf to what business “results” actually were.

…

How to get the results-oriented legal services that business clients need — if their attorneys can’t seem to see beyond their “lawyer tasks”?

This is where Dr. Richard Susskind‘s recent insights — and artificial intelligence (AI) — might help. Susskind is a British lawyer and computer expert. His work emphasizes the ways in which information technology and the Internet can improve lawyers’ effectiveness on behalf of business clients.

November 14, 2018

“Who’s Your [Law] Firm’s Real Client?” (Part 2 of 2)

by Joel A. Webber

One of this blog’s goals is to help business owners and managers understand why their lawyers act the way they do.

My question in this two-part series: Why don’t more law firms treat the businesses that pay their bills like customers?

In my post a week ago I quoted Forbes’ legal commentator Mark Cohen:

“There is unambiguous evidence of a significant and persistent disconnect between law firms and their clients. Only 25% of corporate legal buyers said they would recommend their ‘go-to’ law firm.”

A business owner or manager might ask: Why can’t law firms treat my business with the same care and attention with which Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, the Cleveland Clinic — or my local dry cleaners — treats me?

…

Law firms are rarely managed the way that you run your business. To move toward a relationship with them that better serves your interests, it would help to understand how certain perverse incentives in the law firm world work.

The way law firms handle internal issues — like the two addressed below — creates perverse incentives. And those perverse incentives make law firm leadership more responsive to its partners — its owners — than to the organizations who pay their fees.

November 12, 2018

“Who’s Your [Law] Firm’s Real Client?” (Part 1 of 2)

by Joel A. Webber

In posing the above question last Monday, lawyer and law firm consultant Bruce MacEwen quoted Peter Drucker:

“There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.”

Having consulted to law firms on their business strategies — MacEwen argued that law firms’ “real clients” too often consist of the lawyers who own those firms — and not the organizations who pay those law firms their fees:

“… The firm exists to serve the preferences of its lawyers.”

…

In asking if a law firm really focuses on your business as its true customer — as its client — let’s start by looking at a high-sophistication, high-consequence professional services organization that truly focuses on its customers — its clients.

…

I describe the following with my wife’s permission.

His alert reading of a routine blood test prompted my wife’s internist to identify a specific parathyroid disorder.

He suggested three medical centers for the required surgery: The two most prominent university health systems in Chicago — and Tampa General Hospital.

Frequency of the required surgery:

For each of the two university health systems — fewer than 10 per month.
For Tampa General Hospital / Norman Parathyroid Center — 170 to 180 per month.

We bought plane tickets for Tampa.

November 9, 2018

Why Law Firms Don’t Change Strategy Despite Client Dissatisfaction: A Management Explanation (Part 2 of 2)

by Joel A. Webber

My most recent post introduced an explanation for the question posed above:

The legal profession is an industry managed by committee. There are no outside boards of directors to step in with an “outside view” when things aren’t working.

Law firms are run by — and answerable to — no one other than their own lawyers. The law firm alumni who populate in-house counsel departments have never known any other approach — so they’re usually OK with this.

Of course, a corporation’s senior officers can express displeasure with their attorneys inside and outside of the business. But — with good reason — they are wary of stepping in and second-guessing lawyers steeped in legal rules and institutions of which those senior officers have only a modest understanding.

Free of an “outside view” whose forceful application might bring about necessary changes — business attorneys persist in a status quo of mediocre service delivery — as noted in the most recent post:

“There is unambiguous evidence of a significant and persistent disconnect between law firms and their clients. Only 25% of corporate legal buyers said they would recommend their ‘go-to’ law firm.”

…

But this “outside view” is what empowers human institutions to make painful-but-necessary changes when their outside environment threatens their effectiveness.

Early this year I posted about Andy Grove of Intel: