Managing Legal
The Point
You have two important, but different, types of resources to address legal issues facing your business:
1. LAWYERS: For advice that requires legal judgment to guide business decisions, your company needs accomplished individual attorneys (see July 27, 2022 post). You can’t get legal judgment from an automated platform.
2. AUTOMATED PLATFORMS: Fast, (relatively) cheap, and accurate performance of routine, recurring legal tasks calls for business process experts and technology of the sort operated by alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) (see August 3, 2022 post). Yet law firm junior associates and in-house counsel are the primary go-to sources for routine, recurring legal work. Not ALSPs and their automated platforms.
On routine, recurring legal tasks, the business faces a CATCH-22: The legal profession does everything it can to keep automated platforms and practicing lawyers from working together under one organization (see here). Outside of “reform” states Arizona and Utah, only licensed attorneys may hold an ownership interest in a law practice. So it’s no surprise that such automated platforms within ALSPs comprised only 1.5% of the global legal market last year (see here).
You can fix this. The marketplace affords workarounds to bar authorities’ protectionist impediments, if business leaders are willing insist on them. Continue reading