Managing Legal

Part II

Match the attorney you pick to the decision-maker you face if a court, regulator, or prosecutor with a distinctive viewpoint will be driving the legal outcome.

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An iconic statue of Lady Justice adorns many courthouses.

Don’t take her blindfold too literally.

For instance, a lawyer who practices in Chicago should think twice before taking a case before a circuit court in downstate Illinois. Here the distinctive viewpoint consists of favoring those attorneys who are members of the local legal community — and disfavoring strangers. It’s not universal — but it’s widespread and very real when you run into it.

It’s called getting “home-towned”.

A distinctive viewpoint can go beyond locality to take the form of “the way that this regulatory agency does things” — or “the way that this prosecutor’s office approaches a criminal charge”.

Beyond this, decision-makers like judges or bureaucrats often have their own individual idiosyncrasies in the way that they approach their work.

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So when some distinctive viewpoint might cause Lady Justice’s blindfold to slip you should consider a lawyer who’s privy to the secret handshakes, inside baseball, and other esoterica involved. 

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Part I

Where there’s a lot at stake in the matter at hand it’s usually best to begin with “Who’s the right lawyer?” — Not: “What’s the best law firm?”

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Jane and Susan entered my office:

“Jack wants us to ask you which environmental lawyer we should hire”.

Jack was our company’s president.

Jane was head of a new environmental business unit — an accomplished environmental engineer.

Susan was associate general counsel — whose corporate law acumen I’d long admired.

(All names changed to protect ….)

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I was two years into a transition from practicing lawyer to general manager after a corporate client had invited me to run one of its divisions.

Neither Jane nor Susan reported to me. And I wasn’t part of the general counsel’s office.

I replied: “It’s always great to see you guys. But I don’t know why our president has sent you to talk to me about this!”    

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Take-away #3:

• AI won’t replace a lawyer’s judgment.
• AI will drive labor-saving technology to perform law’s “manual” tasks.

Jeffrey Carr put this best:

AI doesnt' replace lawyer judgment (essence of lawyering) but does replace brute force efforts that are the essence of #LawLand's bus model https://t.co/nNqN4C018h

— Jeffrey Carr (@CarrNext) March 22, 2017

Jeff Carr is that rare general counsel who reduced total legal costs and proactively headed off liability before it arose — instead of the steady, single digit increases in legal budgets that are the norm. 

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Take-away #2 :

The applications of artificial intelligence to legal industry tasks is robust in three areas where the relevant data is publicly available.   

In Part I of this series I wrote that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to predict outcomes in civil litigation isn’t happening any time soon because the necessary data is held mostly in fragmented silos. The relevant data is available from proprietary sources only — you need a law firm’s or company’s permission to access it — and you’re unlikely to get it.

In this Part II I turn to applications for AI to tasks where the relevant data is publicly available.

These applications are further along in development. They’re not yet the subject of widespread adoption (see my post on slow adoption of legal technology).

Legal Research:

Case law, statutes, and regulations are all publicly available. So a handful of tech firms are already applying AI to legal research.

Getting the most widespread attention in this group is Ross Intelligence,

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Application of artificial intelligence (AI) to business law is the subject of much hope and some hype among legal tech promoters, a handful of forward-thinking law professors, alternative legal services providers — and their avid followers in the legal media.

Which brings me to the other (much larger) group — law firm lawyers who base their livelihoods on billable hours and pursuit of associate leverage — and in-house lawyers who pretty much take their professional cues (they’d contend vociferously that this isn’t the case) from what their counterparts in outside law firms do.

Among this group the application of AI to business law meets with one of two responses:

1. Harrumphing skepticism, or
2. Damn-with-faint-praise — “we’ll look at this — later”.

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Lawyers are indispensable for legal analysis.

In fact, they’re so indispensable in situations that call for legal analysis that it’s dumb not to defer to them when a business decision depends on getting the law right.

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Consider:

While in corporate practice in early 1987, I was asked to advise on a lease deal with a company whose principal customer was Texaco. As one of the world’s leading oil companies at the time, Texaco would be an eminently creditworthy customer.

Creditworthy with one caveat: Pennzoil’s 1985 judgment for $8.7 billion then pending against Texaco.

But those pursuing this lease deal were upbeat and undeterred.

They were sure that Texaco would never file bankruptcy. And they asked me to support their conclusion so that they could get on with their credit approval process.

After all, they said, wasn’t it true that no business this big and this creditworthy (except for that pesky $8.7 billion “payable”) had ever filed for bankruptcy?

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While wrapping up Part I of this two-part series I learned through a friend about a sizable family business here in Chicago that has consistently sent its legal work to one of the most prestigious law firms in town — very capable lawyers — with whom I’ve worked directly.

For what seemed like a routine employment matter — these prominent attorneys had proposed litigation on a scale out of all proportion to the problem presented.

And the legal fees — the client’s executives feared — would similarly be on a scale out of all proportion to the problem they faced.

They needed an alternative — and met with a sophisticated sole practitioner who acts as outsourced general counsel to privately-held businesses between $10 million and $50 million in revenues. Continue reading

Seth Godin’s blog post today — “The other kind of customer service” — offers an outlook pretty much foreign to the legal industry:

“Reactive customer service waits until something is broken …

“Perhaps we ought to spend more time being proactive.

” … Guiding the process so that most disappointments won’t even happen, which means we won’t have to fix them …?”

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For most law firm and in-house counsel this does not compute:

This isn’t to deny that lawyers render lip service to “preventive law”. But preventive law is not where the money is — and it’s not how most business lawyers view their jobs.

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