E-Book, Englisch, 750 Seiten
DeStefano / Dobrauz-Saldapenna New Suits
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-3-7272-1043-3
Verlag: Stämpfli
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Appetite for Disruption in the Legal World
E-Book, Englisch, 750 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-7272-1043-3
Verlag: Stämpfli
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
“Time to Leave Law-Law Land ... and Head Back Into the Jungle”
Fuelled by advancing technology, new business models, and altered client expectations, the legal industry faces unprecedented change across its entire value chain. Unfortunately, many legal professionals fear the technology train and the convergence of other fields with law. They see legaltech, AI, and bots like “lions and tigers and bears oh my.” We (the curators and authors of this book) see opportunity. Although the future may require us to put on “new suits”—it represents an enormous opportunity for lawyers to reinvent ourselves for our own and our clients’ benefit. Filled with chapters written by experts in the intersection of law, innovation, and technology, this book provides a global perspective on the diverse legal service delivery ecosystem that will be our future. It provides chapter upon chapter (reason upon reason) explaining why lawyers can and should increase their appetite for disruption in the legal world. So welcome to the jungle and enjoy the ride as we attempt to systematically map the uncharted waters of the future legal realm and simultaneously inspire you to build a new future in law.
Endorsements
«The ‚Artist Formerly Known as the Legal Profession‘ isn’t what it used to be. You think that you know law firms and the challenges that confront lawyers, but you don’t. Legal services providers have spent years resisting change, and now seem determined to pack fifty- or sixty-years of evolution into five. The entire legal services market has been transformed by LegalTech, globalization, and new delivery models – and until now there has been no guide to the way that consumers can benefit and providers can profit from the changes. Guenther and Michele have gathered a Who’s Who of thinkers to provide a marvellous range of visions of the way that law is changing. They provide a roadmap for the future of law – if only you’ll follow it.» Professor Dan Hunter PhD FAAL, Foundation Dean, Swinburne Law School
«‚Nomen est omen‘ if you read the book title of ‘New Suits’. It encourages, allows and requests lawyers at all levels to rethink their former and existing ways of doing business in many areas of law. In the same, it outlines great opportunities to a new breed of experts in our profession. Thanks to the various authors, one gets a good understanding of how massive the impact of technology has become – and is going to be - to the legal services market. And the authors provide a distinct view of how a rather traditional profession will have to transform their business models to comply with the fast changes in the marketplace.» Jürg Birri, Partner / Global Head of KPMG’s Legal
«For a while now, we have been hearing about digitization, disruption and new delivery models in the world of Big Law. «New Suits» both reassures and gives a wake-up call to all of us in the business of providing legal services. Setting out both the opportunities and the threats engendered by the dynamic change in our industry, the book is an invaluable guide to all lawyers and legal business professionals wanting some insight on the challenges facing them in a globalized and accelerating world.» Dr Mattias Lichtblau, CMS
«This book comes at a time where we see just the beginning of a transformational change on the legal market. While such transformation is seen as a great opportunity for those participants who endorse change and innovations, others seem to be more frightened by potential disruption of their well-established business models. The structure and comprehensive contributor listing for this book encapsulates many disparate challenges faced by almost all players on the market. The lecture of the book should give good guidance to anyone who is interested in how the legal profession is (finally) modernizing, capitalizing on technology trends and becoming more client-centric.» Dr Cornelius Grossmann, Global Law Leader, EY Law
«Lawyers will likely always be lawyers. But the way they work will change fundamentally. To their own and their clients benefit. Also we expect a fundamental re-definition of what constitutes actual legal and in particular lawyers' work and what is adjacent and accessory. All of the latter will surely be impacted by technology and other solutions and also the core of our business will face disruption. Michele and Guenther - two recognised legal rebels - have been at the forefront of all of these developments for several years now and have brought together an amazing group of authors to map the current state of the industry and to provide insight into what the future may hold.» Prof Dr Heinz-Klaus Kroppen, Global Legal Leader PwC
«Those of us interested and involved in todays rapidly changing world of legal services delivery have in recent years had plenty of go-to sources to whet our appetites on the topic. But never before has there been in the ‘legal world’ such an elucidation of the ‘appetite for disruption’ as brought to us by Michele DeStefano and Guenther Dobrauz in their new book. The breadth and depth of the history, in theory and in practice, and the future of legal services transformation one finds in ‘New Suits’ is both welcome and exceptional. It will no doubt be widely referred to by general counsels and outside counsel often and extensively as we all continue this interesting journey into the era of the digital lawyer.» William Deckelman, General Counsel, DXC Technology
«The relevance of ‘New Suits’ to considered thought on the state of the legal industry is profound. Other books predict a brave new world for the legal world, but glaringly offer no markers to when or at what scale such evolution will occur. DeStefano and Dobrauz bring clarity and energy to an area that has confounded most academic and business leaders. ‘New Suits’ provides a single source of deep and broad understanding that is actually actionable – and is a must read for anyone who is or will be a leader in the field of law.» Dan Reed, CEO, UnitedLex
«Finally, some lawyers who actually rock» Dave Navarro
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
Weitere Infos & Material
I.Introduction The word «alternative» is definitely trending in the legal zeitgeist. Beginning with the U.K. Legal Services Act and accelerating through the legal tech startup boom, discussion about the growing importance of Alternative Business Structures (ABS) and Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSP) has become a cottage industry in the legal press, and increasingly in the legal academy as well. And for good reason. According to a recent report by Thomson Reuters, Georgetown Law Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession, the University of Oxford Said Business School, and Acritas (a leading provider of legal market intelligence)—a collaboration that in and of itself is a powerful indication of how widespread the discussion of this topic has become—revenues from ALSPs grew from USD 8.4 billion in 2015 to USD 10.7 billion in 2017—a compound growth rate of 12,9% (Thomson Reuters et al. 2019). Nor is this growth limited to just a few industries or kinds of alternative services. As the Thomson Reuters report documents, more than one-third of companies, and over fifty percent of law firms, report that they are currently using at least one of the top five functions typically performed by ALSPs. At the same time, all four of the Big 4 accountancy networks – PwC, Deloitte, EY, and KPMG—have received Alternative Business Structure licenses to operate as multidisciplinary practices (MDPs) in the U.K. (Evans 2018a). Given the exponential growth in the number of legal startups over the last few years (Law Geek 2018), it is no surprise that practitioners and pundits alike expect that «competition from non-traditional services providers will be a permanent trend going forward in the legal services market» (Altman & Weil 2018, at 1). And yet, for all of the talk about the growing importance of these «alternatives», the very discourse used to cast these new providers as the harbingers of impending dramatic changes in the market for legal services continues to marginalize and mask their true significance. Specifically, by labeling everything from legal tech startups, to long-established outsourcing and electronic discovery providers, to leading information and technology companies and the Big 4 as «alternatives», the current debate reinforces the prevailing wisdom, as succinctly stated by John Croft, President and Co-Founder of Elevate, that «there is one ‹proper› way of providing legal services (i.e., going to a traditional law firm) and any other way is ‹alternative› (i.e., wrong/new/risky!)» (Artificial Lawyer 2018). It is not surprising that the discourse has evolved in this fashion. In medicine, for example, «authorities have devoted significant energy and resources to making sure that alternatives maintain lesser status, power and social recognition either alongside or within the margins of dominant systems» (Ross 2012, at 6). Given that lawyers exert even more control over the regulatory system that governs law than doctors do in medicine, it is entirely predictable that incumbents have worked hard to cabin the legitimacy of these potentially «subversive» elements of the legal ecosystem, to borrow Ross’s evocative phrase about medicine, as «alternatives» to «real» law firms. Indeed, even the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines alternative as «different from the usual or conventional; existing or functioning outside the established cultural, social, or economic system». As a result, the only unifying definition that Thomson Reuters et al. (2017, at 1) could muster in their original report on this phenomenon was to say that ALSPs «present an alternative to the traditional idea of hiring a lawyer at a law firm to assist in every aspect of a legal matter». Tellingly, their 2019 report makes no attempt at all to define what constitutes an ALSP (Thomson Reuters et al. 2019). In this Chapter, we argue that this characterization of the range of new providers competing for a share of the global corporate legal services market is fundamentally flawed. This is not because we believe that we are about to witness «The Death of Big Law» (Ribstein 2010), or even more dramatically, «The End of Lawyers?» (Susskind 2008). To be sure, some law firms will surely «die», and some lawyers will surely lose their jobs. Nevertheless, we believe that so-called «traditional» large law firms will continue to occupy an important place in the legal ecosystem for the foreseeable future—although as we suggest below, the law firms that prosper will be those that harness what we will define as «adaptive innovation» to respond to the changing needs of their clients (Dolin & Buley 2019). But the ecosystem in which both law firms and a wide range of other providers will compete is one that will increasingly require the integration of law into broader «business solutions» that allow sophisticated corporate clients to develop customized, agile, and empirically verifiable ways of solving complex problems efficiently and effectively. As this ecosystem matures, it will both decenter traditional understandings of how to provide high quality legal services, while at the same time raising critical questions about how to preserve traditional ideals of predictability, fairness, and transparency at the heart of what we mean by the rule of law. Understanding the dynamics of this new ecosystem will be critical for all legal service providers seeking to do business in the new global age of more for less. Our argument proceeds in three parts. In Part II we briefly locate the current demand for ALSPs within the broader context of the large-scale forces that are reshaping the global economy, and therefore inevitably reshaping the market for corporate legal services in which both «traditional» and «alternative» providers compete. These forces, we argue, are producing a market that favors «integrated solutions» and value-based pricing over traditional domain expertise purchased on a fee for service basis. In Part III, we discuss the implications of this trend for legal service providers of all types. Specifically, we argue that corporate clients will increasingly demand professional services that are «integrated», «customized», and «agile». These demands, in turn, will move what are now considered «alternative» providers such as technology companies, flexible staffing models, and multidisciplinary service firms like the Big 4 to the core of the market, while putting pressure on law firms to articulate how the services that they provide contribute to producing integrated solutions for clients. Finally, in Part IV we conclude by identifying some key challenges that this new corporate legal ecosystem poses for legal education, legal regulation, and the rule of law. II.From Oligopoly to Global Supply Chains: The Evolution of the Corporate Legal Services Market The first thing that is misleading about the current discourse that seeks to define a set of «alternatives» to traditional law firms is that it frequently equates «alternative» with «new». Thomson Reuters et al. (2017, at 1) original report on ALSPs is typical. After asserting that «[t]raditionally, clients looked to law firms to provide a full range of legal and legally related services», the report states that «[t]oday, by contrast, consumers of legal services find themselves the beneficiaries of a new and growing number of nontraditional service providers that are changing the way legal work is getting done» (Id.). But this way of characterizing the current suite of «alternative providers» fails to acknowledge that clients have been looking for alternative ways to source legal services for more than a century—starting with engaging what we now consider to be «traditional» law firms. This historical context is critical to understanding the contemporary market for corporate legal services and its likely future. A.ALSP 1.0: The Cravath System Ironically, what we now consider to be the «traditional» mode of providing corporate legal services was once itself an «alternative». Prior to the turn of the twentieth century, there were no large law firms in the United States, or for that matter, anywhere in the world. The overwhelming majority of lawyers were solo practitioners, or worked in small and loosely affiliated law firms, serving a mix of individual and business clients primarily by appearing in court. To the extent that America’s businesses had legal needs, they were serviced either by internal lawyers—for example, David Dudley Field, Chief Counsel to the Erie and Lackawanna Railroad, who was one of the most powerful (and arguably corrupt) lawyers in the latter decades of the nineteenth century—or by a mix of solo practitioners and self-help. It was not until the early decades of the twentieth century that lawyers like Paul Cravath, Thomas G. Sherman, and John W. Davis created what has come to be known as the «Cravath System»—formally organized law firms consisting of «associates» and «partners» hired directly from top law schools, providing a full suite of services to big corporations—that we now take for granted as the norm against which all other service providers should be judged (Galanter & Palay 1991). Moreover, like all «alternatives», the Cravath System was considered subversive by the legal elites of the...
