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Law firm disrupters make their colleagues nervous

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Nick Abrahams' job is to work out how new technologies can change how lawyers do their jobs and ultimately help cut costs for clients.

Nick Abrahams is on a mission to turn professionals who are "praying" technology won't affect their jobs into "players" who can talk AI and blockchain.  James Alcock

But Norton Rose Fulbright's global head of innovation might have been a little bit too successful at it. All his talk of innovation has made lawyers nervous about whether their jobs are still as recession-proof as they once were.

Indeed, Mr Abrahams' own side hustle, LawPath, a company he co-founded six years ago, is a classic disrupter in the sense that technology has made it possible to offer legal services in a different way at a different price point. LawPath provides online pro forma resources for smaller enterprises and gives clients access to lawyers for set yearly fees.

While Mr Abrahams argues that LawPath provides services to clients who would otherwise be priced out of the market and thus doesn't take a bite out of big law's profits, it's enough to give lawyers the sense their world is changing, albeit perhaps not quite as speedily as enthusiastic tech heads proselytise at Silicon Valley-esque conferences.

To assuage their job anxiety, Mr Abrahams has launched an online course for anxious lawyers to help them understand how artificial intelligence, blockchain and data privacy actually work.

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The firm's "micro-certificate" in disruptive technologies combines an industry podcast and YouTube tutorial vibe, and features prerecorded presentations, tests and reading materials that break down different "disruptive technologies" and their effect on industries from healthcare to finance.

Right now, the course is free for anyone to take, not just those working in the legal profession.

Prayers, stayers and players

Mr Abrahams said that workers are in three camps when it comes to their attitudes towards technology: "prayers, stayers and players".

"The prayers are generally over 50, and they're just praying that they get to retire before machines take their jobs. Stayers are people generally over the age of 30, and they’re not embracing technology, and that's a problem. They're looking at it from the point of view of, if I do a good job, then I’ll get to keep my job. So we've got to help those people," Mr Abrahams says.

"And then you've got your under-30s who are all mostly players, and they've embraced technology. But it’s incumbent on every organisation to train staff."

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Any business person worth their salt knows the importance of creating solutions to unmet consumer problems, and advertisers know that if there is no problem, it's fine to just invent one. For example, marketers first had to convince people that "body odour" was a thing in order to sell them deodorant.

For Mr Abrahams' course, that "problem" is "disruptive technologies anxiety", which he alludes to in a video advertisement.

"There is a wave of social awkwardness happening at dinner parties across the world. Its name is disruptive technologies anxiety, or DTA," he says.

"It occurs when disruptive technologies like blockchain and AI are mentioned at a dinner party, and guests, rather than facing the embarrassment of admitting that they don't really understand what it’s all about, they mumble words to the effect of 'I think it's going to be really big' before then trying to quickly change the subject."

Netflix-style learning

The message is clearly tongue in cheek, but it taps into one of lawyers' greatest fears: not being the smartest person in the room. However, Mr Abrahams says that not understanding or seeking to understand new technologies is a genuine problem and not a beat-up.

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Furthermore, he says lead indicators such as patent filings can help distinguish what technology changes are mere noise in the zeitgeist from those that are here to stay.

"We've got 8000 people across 50 offices. So, what we can see is actually which technologies are really starting to move, and where we often see it first is in our patent filing area. So we can see that, let's say, three years ago, AI patents and autonomous patents, that work really started to ramp up," he says.

"So, that's sort of a lead indicator of where the R&D [research and development] is going, and then you can follow that through, and we then start to see people ask for more advice."

Short courses give people the ability to learn new things beyond a panicked, cursory Wikipedia search. Mr Abrahams says that the course has been met with enthusiasm thus far.

He also noted an "interesting" split in how people approached doing the course, with more Millennials opting to binge the whole six-hour micro-certificate in one hit.

"It's a fascinating insight into the way the younger generation is interested in learning and are looking at a micro-certificate course like the way they'd look at Netflix. We are hopeful that we can change the vernacular from 'Netflix and chill' to 'micro-cert and chill'," he says.

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Mr Abrahams has been at Norton Rose for two decades, and part of the global innovation team for two years.

Other Big Law firms have been investing in partners adept at driving technological innovation from within, from Gilbert + Tobin's chief operating officer and former McKinsey & Co partner Sam Nickless to Minter Ellison's head of innovation Andrew Cunningham.

Before Norton Rose, Mr Abrahams worked as a creative executive at Warner Brothers in Hollywood and ran a comedy club in Japan.

He keeps his stand-up comedy flame alight today with a part-time gig as a "comic futurist", where he gives keynote speeches with an entertaining twist on many of the topics found in his e-learning modules.

Natasha Gillezeau is a journalist for The Australian Financial Review based in the Sydney office. Connect with Natasha on Twitter. Email Natasha at natasha.gillezeau@afr.com.au

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