{"id":10897,"date":"2016-11-10T08:40:47","date_gmt":"2016-11-10T08:40:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/consultoresfb.com\/?p=10897"},"modified":"2016-11-10T08:40:47","modified_gmt":"2016-11-10T08:40:47","slug":"the-velocity-of-change-in-the-legal-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/consultoresfb.com\/index.php\/2016\/11\/10\/the-velocity-of-change-in-the-legal-industry\/","title":{"rendered":"The Velocity of Change in the Legal Industry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"cars\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Law firms have undergone significant organizational, operational, and economic changes over the last decade\u2014leveraging new technology, pricing and service models, and operating on unprecedented global scales. The pace of change shows no hint of slowing down, with the complexities, opportunities, and challenges that law firms face as they compete for global clients in a price sensitive, increasingly competitive environment. That said, the best-managed firms have an opportunity to significantly benefit by outmaneuvering and outthinking their more change-resistant competitors.<\/p>\n

The Law Firm of 2016 Vastly Different than the Law Firm of 2006<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Ten years ago, a 2006 ABA roundtable on law firm technology and operational trends<\/a><\/strong>, noted the improvements in sophistication of e-discovery, records management, and early stage knowledge management and collaboration tools, and the nascent move to outsourcing more routine and repetitive legal work to shared services\/lower cost centers.<\/p>\n

Five years ago, in a 2011 article, The Economist detailed the \u201cforces\u201d at work in shaping the economic and business landscape of the legal industry<\/a><\/strong>, including \u201cclients [becoming] keener to query their bills \u2013 and to demand alternatives to the convention of charging by the hour, such as flat, capped or contingent fees\u201d and globalization, with its corresponding rise in competition. These factors, in turn, were predicted to soon create bifurcated paths to success: a cadre of elite law firms \u201ctightly focused\u201d in a few fields of practice, and the development of mega-sized multinational firms with the \u201cpromise that wherever clients want to do business, they will deal with a seamless entity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, each of these trends has come to shape the legal industry with varying degrees of significance, but in any case, the business of successfully managing a major, multinational professional services institution, delivering sophisticated and robust legal solutions to clients (i.e., a leading global law firm) is certainly a more complex, competitive, and comprehensive proposition than ever before.<\/p>\n

Pricing and Legal Service Delivery<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The 2016 Report on the State of the Legal Market, jointly issued by the Center of the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown University Law Center and Thomson Reuters<\/a><\/strong>, found that \u201claw firms clients are more willing than ever before to disaggregate matters, combining the services of several different service providers in order to achieve increased efficiencies.\u201d This extends to \u201cutilizing non-traditional service providers (including non-law firms) to provide a wide range of services previously obtained almost exclusively from law firms.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the report notes<\/a><\/strong> that many law firms have made at least superficial \u201cpassive and reactive\u201d efforts to address this shift \u2013 working to improve budgeting, legal project management, and exploring alternative fee arrangements \u2013 there is tangible, \u201cmounting evidence that firms that have responded proactively\u2026by making strategic changes to their lawyer staffing, service delivery, and pricing models are outperforming their peers in terms of financial results.\u201d Broadly, \u201cfirms at the highest end of the market will always be sought out for critical, bet-the-company work\u2026but the range of activities that only traditional law firms can undertake will continue to narrow\u2026the Walmarts and Amazons of professional services are at the gates.\u201d<\/p>\n

Artificial Intelligence<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Knowledge management has evolved from an esoteric field to a function that is central to how well-managed firms operate. New systems and technology solutions have greatly facilitated the capture, storage, accessibility, sharing, and ability to utilize the wide array of data and work product generated through the course of business. Lawyers now have dashboards to monitor financial, team, matter, and practice performance in real-time, resulting in better data-driven decision making and management.<\/p>\n

And as firms look to improve efficiency and drive innovation, artificial intelligence (AI) may come to play an increasingly more meaningful role in certain areas of legal practice. Baker Hostetler recently announced the \u201chire\u201d of the world\u2019s first AI lawyer<\/a><\/strong>, ROSS \u2013 a software platform that utilizes the IBM Watson system \u2013 as a legal researcher in its bankruptcy practice to \u201ccomb through huge batches of data\u201d and provide responses in natural language \u201cas intuitive as an actual colleague.\u201d In addition to greatly reducing time and cost<\/a><\/strong> in \u201cquickly responding to questions after searching through billions of documents,\u201d if conditions, regulations and laws change \u201cROSS will be able to track whether it affects the case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Besides improving research functionality, AI is entering the realm of \u201cpredicting legal outcomes<\/a><\/strong>.\u201d Technologists at Michigan State University \u201ccreated an algorithm to predict the outcomes of U.S. Supreme Court cases [that] attained 70 percent accuracy for 7,700 rulings\u201d \u2013 and service providers are \u201ctaking that one step further, working with analyzed information to predict future litigation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Globalization <\/strong><\/h2>\n

Between 2015 and 2016<\/a><\/strong> Mayer Brown, Shearman & Sterling, and DLA Piper had 10, 11, and 16 percent total office growth, which included 14, 14, and 23 percent growth (respectively) outside of the U.S. While these numbers are impressive in their own right, the firm that topped the charts in global expansion figures was Dentons, with an amazing 156 percent growth (153 percent outside of the U.S.), tripling from 2,580 to more than 7,500 lawyers worldwide, and expanding its global reach from 26 to 57 countries.<\/p>\n

Dentons strategy and \u201cpolycentric\u201d value proposition has been clearly articulated by its Global Chief Executive Officer, Elliott Portnoy: \u201cunlike other firms, we have no headquarters, and there is no central or dominant region or location \u2013 we will be Australian in Australia just as we are African in South Africa. We don\u2019t have one dominant culture because we don\u2019t believe clients are seeking that kind of centralized approach. Indeed, we do business like our clients do.\u201d This includes the potential to provide legal services, globally, to multinational clients on a scale above and beyond historically traditional law firms.<\/p>\n

Even for firms with a less aggressive appetite for worldwide growth, the rapid \u201cshrinking\u201d of the globe, continuing intersection of geographic spheres of influence, rise in multinational expansion and commercial engagement in client industries, and other associated factors mean that managing and leading across increasingly complex global constituencies becomes more and more important for successful law firm leaders by the day.<\/p>\n

Law firms have changed dramatically as institutions in the 21st century. As the legal industry continues its accelerated pace of transformation, myriad possibilities are open for the best-managed firms that are able to anticipate and adapt to new economic and business conditions. While further dramatic shifts \u2013 such as finally \u201cbreaking the lock on the billable hour mentality,\u201d<\/a><\/strong> or even departure from the partnership model \u2013 might seem far-fetched today, they could quickly become the reality of tomorrow.<\/p>\n

William Lepiesza is a director at The Alexander Group, an international executive search firm.<\/i><\/p>\n

M\u00e1s informaci\u00f3n en:<\/h6>\n
http:\/\/www.law.com\/sites\/almstaff\/2016\/11\/03\/the-velocity-of-change-in-the-legal-industry\/<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Law firms have undergone significant organizational, operational, and economic changes over the last decade\u2014leveraging new technology, pricing and service models, and operating on unprecedented global scales. The pace of change shows no hint of slowing down, with the complexities, opportunities, and challenges that law firms face as they compete for global clients in a price […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10903,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-fb","category-noticias-del-sector"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/consultoresfb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/consultoresfb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/consultoresfb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/consultoresfb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/consultoresfb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/consultoresfb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10897\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/consultoresfb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/consultoresfb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/consultoresfb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/consultoresfb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}