5 reasons why legal services have to change, and will.
I want to spend a few more words explaining where I'm coming from and where I am going.
I took to the consulting road to improve my lifestyle (less stress, more time with my family, flexibility to manage my day) and to have more freedom to work with companies that I like and truly believe in. But most importantly, to be able to really focus my creative energies on better and simpler ways of doing difficult things.
This focus is informed by 5 key observations I have made in my career - which highlight how legal services too often fail to meet expectations or their true potential.
1. Clients don’t need advice.
Businesses and in-house lawyers don’t need advice or judgment. They want help to meet their objectives, reduce uncertainty, and save time. Too often what they get is theoretical and siloed, increases uncertainty, creates extra work for the in-house lawyers who have to translate it for the business - and still leaves the business to do the bulk of the actual problem-solving.
2. Awkward and old-fashioned.
There is a huge gap between the promises of legal tech and how law is done day-to-day. Contracts, for the most part, are full of archaisms, negotiated using long-winded Word documents exchanged by email attachment with layers of red-lining. Lawyers are generally not good at planning and project-managing complex legal work and rarely use tools - or experts - to do so. Despite the wide availability of communication and collaboration tools, communication and collaboration is too often very poor. There is a lot of change in this space, but most legal work is still done in surprisingly old-fashioned inefficient ways - if you think about it.
3. Dirt under fingernails.
Lawyers are great at giving advice, writing policies and giving long-winded training sessions. But there is a wide chasm between that and actually implementing policies, embedding guidance into business workflow and making it all dovetail with business process. This needs ownership, a cross-functional outlook, willingness to get dirt under your fingernails - and the right cost and skillset.
4. It’s complicated.
The more you know, the more complicated you’re going to make it - unless you try really hard not to. Today’s complex world demands simplification. To have any hope, you must have simplicity as one of your express top objectives, always. How often have you seen that? And how often have you seen projects mushroom into untamed monsters? There you have it.
5. Risk? No, thank you.
We don’t like to make decisions on risk. We say it’s up to the business to decide. But often the person who is best placed to understand risk is the legal expert. Decisions which are both bold and risk-smart need co-accountability, a willingness to stick your neck out and fresh ways to make risk more visible and measurable - but that’s not how a lot of decisions are made in practice.
So what am I going to do about it?
In-house lawyers are often dissatisfied with their external advisers, and businesses complain about lawyers all the time. This is a generalisation, but talking to businesses (and my own experiences), there are still significant gaps between what they get, and what they could (and should) get.
These observations have informed my own approach:
Beyond advice
Made simple
Made real
Next generation
In my next post, I will explain each of these - my manifesto for legal services.