Legal Tech, Innovation and Lawyers : a story of love & hate ?
Lawyers and the adoption of Innovation
Working as the Chief Digital Officer of a top French corporate law-firm, my job is to engage all staff on digital transformation by spreading innovation culture, and the adoption of new tools and methodologies. From HR, to Communication through, obviously -the crux of the matter- lawyers.
Few years ago, I was working mostly with banks in transformation projects. Back then, digital transformation in Finance (and the explosion of Fintechs) was the trendy topic in the ecosystem. The saying was that, there wasn’t an industry as hard as finance to be distrupt. I though it too.
What is Innovation in the Legal industry afterall ?
As you certainly know, innovation can be defined as the use of a new product, a new methodology, or even a new organization.
In the legal industry, innovation is mainly spreading through the emergence of Legal Tech, and the adoption of new methodologies and business models.
In 2019, investment in Legal Tech companies in France increased by 111% ! It is clear that Legal Tech have a bright future and that the market starts to response positively to legal innovation. Therefore, despite this excellent evolution, it is necessary to precise that those investments represent only 1,14% of the total French fundraise.
Legal Tech are not really a big homogenous group of startups. Eventually, some of them are not in competition with each other at all. Those companies can be divided into two groups :
- Legal Tech for individuals and companies : those startups are really distrupting the Legal industry. Most of them want to make law accessible for everybody, and sell services that were the monopoly of lawyers. (wait for it, we will talk about it later).
- Legal Tech for lawyers/legal departments: here, you have all the startups that are offering services for the law workforce. Their goal is to make people more efficient. In terms of competition, they are mostly going after old big companies that used to work with law firms for more than decades.
Among the most successful Legal Tech in France, you can find startups from those two groups named previsouly. LegalStart (18 million of fundraising), demanderjustice.com (1,5 million), Justifit (1 million), Avoloi (2,5 million), Testamento (3 million) are targeting individuals or small companies. On the other hand, Predictice (5 million), Hyperlex (4 million), or Doctrine (10 million) are targeting companies.
Concerning new methodologies, a lot of initiatives are emerging. For the recall, innovation doesn’t have to necessary involve technology. In the legal industry, the emerging methodologies take different forms. But they all have an impact on the evolution of the way of working.
For instance, customer relationship is transformed by Legal Design, Plain Legal Language or the evolution of Business Model of some lawyers.
Innovation & Lawyers : love at first sight ?
Half of Legal Tech are dedicated to make lawyers worklife easier and the other half are racing against them : so what could lawyers possibly do to win the race ? Taking the best of innovation, adopting new tools and improving their productivity !
Most of the lawyers I met are more than aware that innovation and technology are their best allies. Some of them are also really curious to know more about Legal Tech and innovation in their industry.
To illustrate, every year I lead the organization of a “Digital Day” in my firm : a day dedicated to innovation. Between UX workshop, IA and Blockchain conferences, code initiation, cybersecurity classes…the inscriptions are full in one day. Lawyers are happy to finally understand all those buzzwords and how it can help them in their worklife.
But, in everyday life ?
Where do we stand when it is time to adopt and change the way lawyers work by using Legal Tech or new methodologies ?
I am frequently solicited by Legal Tech trying to work with us. I am always curious and accept pretty much all demo as it allows having a clear view of the market. When some seem to be really relevant, I bring lawyers into the process to determine if it could be a fit with them.
As the value proposition is to make them more efficient, contrario to the common belief, lawyers are always open to discover innovations brough by those companies. When I started, I was expecting senior lawyers to be the most sceptical to those subjects in contrast with younger ones. Then I realize this is not the case.
When talking about attorney’s reluctance to changing their way of working, you can find a lot of young lawyers protecting their fantasy of the old prestigious way of working, that they dreamed of for years. This is something one of my partners brough to me, telling me that “you will see, some junior lawyers are resistant to change. But years of practice will make them change their minds.”
Among my “sponsors”, you can find a lot of partners, craving for Tech and Innovation, and pushing their juniors to really take a look into it. From my point of view, there is a real desire to dig into Legal Tech and Innovation. I never met a lawyer who told me that he/she was afraid to be replaced by Legal Tech or that felt threatened by innovation.
Sometimes I wonder if that is because my firm is particulary into innovation and also maybe that, our success in business doesn’t make us feel the urge of changing (beyond our personal succes, the number of lawyers in France for the past decade doubled, when the net benefice tripled on the same period, from 1,5 billion to 4,4billion).
Actually, I don’t really think that there is an urge for change for legal companies as it was for Kodak back then : their salvation would have been to completely change their business model. The way I see it, there is an urge to built a solid foundation of digital and innovation culture, create a space that let juniors own new tools and build new competences, in addition to what they already know. This is actually slowly happening in France : bar schools and law universities are changing the way they are educating their students.
Is there really hate ?
Remember your high school best friend and your ambiguious relationship pulled between fights and reconciliation ? Well, this is it. The french bar launched a lawsuit after Doctrine, yet lawyers kept asking me for Doctrine access, especially during the COVID-19 lockdown.
There is this great movements where frenchbars are creating incubators. There is indeed no better way to launch a successful startup than to be really close to your future users (lawforce). There is also no doubt that this proximity between startup founders and frenchbars is a win-win : startups have the opportunity to growth being supported by the French bars, and bars can experience the everyday life of a startup : a completely different world.
However, one of the reason for the emergence of those incubator is “in part to prevent non-lawyers from encroaching into their sector”.
We all are waiting for the next “Doctolib du Droit” (“the legal Doctolib”, Doctolib being a really successful unicorn operating in the medical sector), yet we tend to forget that Doctolib was created by two techs and two business profiles. Hand in hand with fifty doctors.
But hey, none of the Doctolib cofounders where graduates from medical school and none of them would be able to read a brain scanner. Yet they made the life of thousand of doctors so much easier.
There is an information effort to make all lawyers trust this process : a succesful Legal Tech, founded or not by a lawyer could increase your efficiency, or help you bring new business.
So, why is adopting Innovation & Legal Tech a challenge ? Spoiler Alert, the answer is not hate.
Well, the main reason of what makes it challenging would be the lack of time. Innovation takes times. Working with new tools too. You need to be formed to take advantage of a new product : meaning not spending billable hours on your clients files. Yes, an innovation or the use of a Legal Tech can change the life of a lawyer. But if you don’t create and explain the fast track to achieve it, there is no chance that they will have time for it.
The second reason is the difficulty to understand the value proposition : a lot of promises and a glossy marketing speech makes an already really busy brain not really ready to dig into the subject. If you want to help a lawyer, don’t make him/her spend time trying to understand “how does that really help me”?
Leading to the third reason, last but not least : expectations management. I understand the need of marketing speech and glossy advertising -which is actually at the beginning enjoyed by the lawyers, as they find it refreshing.
But please, don’t sell the moon to people that, for most, don’t have a technical background. They will believe you. Good luck winning back their trust once they understand that they will not that easily save “78 billable hours” or “clear their schedule of half of their repetitive taks in one glance”.
Legal Tech aside, how could we improve Innovation in legal firm ? Why does it is seems more challenging than in other industries ?
My personnal answer would be : culture. When I started this job, my lawyer friend told me : “Keep in mind that, as a student, when you were going at your exam with a computer, I was going with a suitcase full of legal code”.
That really hit me. On one side you have business/engineering students that present business models during project group on their Mac to their professor, trying to connect it to the projector with an adaptator, mastering the skills of PowerPoint, Prezi, InDesign or Excel. On the other side, law school students : learning law pretty much the same old way that it was teached decade ago.
Today, my business school teach a lot of different things using different tools that we didn’t have six years ago : marketing using VR, learning to code Python and other langages. Back in my student days, we had an exchange semester abroad. Today, in addition to that, student have an exchange semester in a school of their choice: design, engineering or coding.
Can we notice such a huge change on law universities looking at the past decade ? Not really.
Yep, there is no such things as love or hate between lawyers & Legal Tech and Innovation
It is more about a traditional profession that, for most, is ready to take the bet on the innovation but don’t have yet the innovation culture and ressources to do so at a national level.
Senior lawyers are pointing the flaws in the education of young lawyers that don’t help them embrace innovation later in their career. And universities are hearing, and taking action. This is what gives me hope that, in ten years, it will be a totally different story as this generation of law student is evolving in an innovation ecosystem
