Law new means benefiting clients with innovative legal help that focuses on process, embraces technology and is often delivered by non-lawyers. It also typically involves a mix of project, contract and hourly-based work that does not fall under the partner track. This type of legal practice is not for every firm, but it can provide an important source of revenue and a way to offer more specialized services to a client base.
A key element of law new is collaboration. The complexity and rapid pace of change in business, society and the legal industry require a collaborative approach to problem solving. This collaboration is driven by a range of factors including the need to solve complex issues that cannot be mastered by one function, company, stakeholder group or nation; the need to address significant risks and capture opportunities at the speed of business; and the need to work with and across enterprise functions, teams and industries.
This collaboration includes leveraging the power of data and collective experience to deliver scalable, practical, predictive legal solutions to once bespoke issues. Legal platforms, for example, can serve as a secure repository of information and knowledge to enable more effective legal delivery and create economies of scale, reduce time, cost and risk. They can also accelerate the time to market for new products and services by enabling a faster, more efficient, less expensive, more predictable process to produce legal outcomes.
The legal industry needs to become more customer-centric, removing its artificial distinctions between providers and their customers and societies. This requires a more holistically diverse workforce, cognitively, demographically, culturally and experientially. This workforce must be tech and data-proficient, empathetic, creative, agile and collaborative to deliver accessible, affordable, on-demand, legal products and services at the speed of business and society.
Law makers, regulators and courts are continuing to introduce new laws and refine existing ones in order to keep pace with the changing legal environment. These changes are being accelerated by new technology, a shift in the regulatory landscape and the need to ensure that legal service delivery is consistent with the principles of good governance.
These changes are driving a revolution in legal services. A growing number of companies, including established corporate Goliaths such as Microsoft MSFT -0.4% and Amazon AMZN -0.6%, are entering the legal space. These competitors have the brand, capital, know-how, legal buyer activism, data mastery, technology platforms and agile, multidisciplinary teams to compete with traditional law firms. They are deploying their resources to develop, test and implement new legal solutions that can address some of the most pressing issues facing today’s business leaders and society at large. They can deliver a higher value to their legal buyers, avoid the significant lost opportunity costs of protracted disputes and free up management time to focus on core business objectives. In doing so, they will challenge legal stakeholders to rethink their legacy delivery models and outdated legal education and self-regulation structures. They will put the customer at the center of their legal strategies and deliver impactful, sustainable, cost-effective, legally responsive and ethically sound results.