We are in the midst of an innovation explosion in how legal services are delivered, sourced, packaged, priced and defined. This development is the consequence of a number of macroeconomic trends, including globalization and disruptive technologies, that have increased volatility and placed downward pressure on corporate profits.
As companies have been forced to transform, pressure is growing on corporate legal departments to do more – and more complex – work, with the same or fewer resources.
To address this challenge, General Counsel are increasingly running their departments like businesses, cutting overhead, measuring quality, developing talent, and optimizing service delivery.
They are also demanding more from their external partners, with a new ecosystem of countless new providers offering insights, skills, and tools to help them better manage the business side of their practice.
Focus of reflection and discussion from some of the issues that arise from these trends include:
- The evolution of/disruption underway in the legal industry: setting the stage, context, etc
- More for Less dynamic generated new ecosystem that has un-bundled the legal value chain.
- Concurrent re-imagination of legal function, in-house and elsewhere and digital transformation story.
- What skills/capabilities do 21st Century lawyers need?
- Legal acumen is a baseline.
- To excel need new soft and hard skills.
- Soft: curiosity, courage (to say yes and no), communication, grit, CQ, EQ
- Hard: Project management, financial literacy, Legal Tech/Ops, change management, etc.
- What are the implications for legal education?
- Law school - created for and driven by law firms, rankings
- US schools, business vs. law school, up or out, diversity of thought
- Foreign schools: IE, Bucerius; Coursera approach; just in time videos; employability skills
- Decline of law as a profession and rise of it as a business
- What does value add mean for modern lawyers?
- Client centricity
- CX
- Brand
- Looking ahead, where will the profession be in five years? What impact will COVID-19 have on that journey?
- Law as a product and service and not as a labor intensive service only
- Billable hour and scalability (input vs output)
- Lexis Nexis vs Google
- Accelerate current trends more than generate new ones.
Find the key takeaways here.
Presented with Digital Legal Exchange
