Technology

Legal Tech For The Legal Elite: Observations Of Two Conferences

Conversations about innovation in legal technology and practice continue to be stuck in the same echo chamber.

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I just spent five days at two conferences dedicated to the 10 percent in law who make up big firms and big corporations, wondering how legal tech and innovation became the domain of the legal elite, and how true change will come about in law without more voices at the table.

The first four days of my week were at Legalweek, the conference formerly known as Legaltech and still primarily focused on technology. On Friday, I detoured to Inspire.Legal, a new “unconference” devoted to “inspiring creative new solutions” to “the most pressing problems facing our industry.”

They were very different events. Legalweek is a venerable trade show, started in 1982, where buyers of legal technology go to shop for products and attend educational sessions. Inspire.Legal is a brand-new, fresh, and creative attempt to explore the problems that face the legal industry and begin to craft solutions.

But in addition to their same-week timing and New York City venue, the two shared one defining characteristic: They were predominately by, for, and about the roughly 10 percent of the legal industry dominated by the world’s largest law firms and corporations.

At Legalweek, one need only have looked at the roster of speakers to see how the conference skewed. They came mostly from large law firms such as Baker McKenzie, Morgan Lewis, Orrick Herrington, and Seyfarth Shaw, or from large corporations such as JPMorgan Chase, GlaxoSmithKline, AIG, and Toyota, or from major vendors that provide products and services to large firms and large corporations, most prominently in the area of eDiscovery.

Inspire.Legal promised that one of its top goals would be to break out of the “innovation echo chamber,” which it described as “starved of original thought.” Yet its panelists (“luminaries” it called them) and moderators were drawn exclusively from within the echo chamber — and not only that, but largely from within the echo chamber that focuses on large law firms and large corporations.

In saying this, I mean the organizers and speakers no offense. At Inspire.Legal, in particular, organizer Christian Lang, head of strategy at Reynen Court, managed to pull together one of the most fertile pools of legal thought leaders ever assembled in a single room. I have the highest respect for all of them (and I’ve been honored to feature several of them as guests on my LawNext podcast). Most of the speakers at Legalweek were equally top-notch.

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But between Legalweek and Inspire.Legal, it was a week spent among the legal elite, participants drawn from the identical world of giant law firms and giant corporations, focused largely on Biglaw/big business agendas. To its credit, Inspire.Legal also delved into improving legal education, but even then, the discussion was largely from the perspective of the big firms that would someday hire future crops of law students.

Whose voices were missing from these conferences? For one, it was the roughly 90 percent of lawyers who practice outside the large firm/large corporation ecosystem. Neither of these conferences was designed or structured with them in mind.

Who else was missing? How about those the legal system is failing?

Watching the Twitter stream in the wake of Inspire.Legal, I saw this thread, initiated by Jeffrey Carr, general counsel of Univar:

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Telling was the response of one of Inspire.Legal’s organizers: “There was a lot of that conversation. People captured and discussed what customers wanted.” Attendees even filled out “Stakeholder Statement” cards as an exercise in using the language of customers and other stakeholders.

But those people discussing what customers wanted weren’t customers. For the most part, they were lawyers and legal services providers. Just look at the roster of the 50 moderators, which, from what I saw, seemed fairly reflective of the professional backgrounds of the attendees overall. It was legal services providers saying what customers want, not customers. Does that strike anyone as paternalistic?

In her thoughtful and considered book, Rules for A Flat World, legal scholar and economist Gillian K. Hadfield argues for how to reinvent law for a global economy. In her final chapter, she distills her research into five recommendations. One of them is this: “Don’t leave it to the lawyers.”

Rather, she says, the conversation needs to include those who are “paying the price of inadequate, complex, and costly legal infrastructure.” But merely having lawyers include these others in the conversation is not enough, Hadfield says.

Innovation of better legal infrastructure also needs to be a challenge taken on by a broad and diverse group of people and organizations. It cannot be left to lawyers. Not because lawyers aren’t smart and capable of being creative. But because discussions among lawyers take place in an echo chamber.

Ah, yes, the echo chamber. The one we were supposed to break out of. That can’t be done by assembling a roomful of lawyers, even as stellar an assemblage as this conference was. Hadfield explains:

Lawyers need to be prodded and poked by ideas they have never even thought of as a way of meeting the need for law. The solutions up for development need to include ones that lawyers can’t, especially working alone, deliver: solutions that require new technology, new business models, new forms of organization.

I understand that half or more of the legal market economy is driven by big firms and big corporations. But that is partly because the lower economic levels of the market are being underserved or not served at all. A cure for the legal woes of that biglaw market is a valid pursuit. But let’s not forget it’s only a piece of the puzzle.

To quote Hadfield once more:

We need to hear the voices of the small businesses and ordinary people trying to navigate the legal world without guidance. The four billion people living outside of workable legal frameworks around the globe and trying to make sure their land is not stolen, their businesses allowed to operate, and their savings safe. The sophisticated global corporations that find themselves facing a world in which economic logic is being rewritten by digitization and global supply chains, and regulatory logic is collapsing. The citizen groups that worry about the future of work, the climate, privacy, security, income inequality.

I do not mean to be critical of either of these conferences. Each fills an important role within the legal industry. I, for one, will be back at Legalweek next year, and if there is a repeat of Inspire.Legal, I would not miss it (provided they’d let me back in after this column).

But after a week at these back-to-back events, I am left feeling that the conversations about innovation in legal technology and practice continue to be stuck in the same echo chamber. Even worse, it is a chamber occupied largely by the biglaw legal elite, one that excludes the voices and perspectives of those who have the most at stake in the innovation equation.

If we truly want to solve the problems that face the legal system, the legal system as a whole, then we need to find ways to bring together all the stakeholders. That means Biglaw and small law, big business and small business, clients and those who cannot afford to become clients, those embroiled in the system and those excluded from it.

Our industry faces pressing problems. We can’t solve them in a bubble.

Robert Ambrogi Bob AmbrogiRobert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

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