On August 15th The Law Lab at the Illinois Tech Chicago-Kent College of Law hosted #MakeLawBetter, a Ted-talk style conference, complete with cold brew and maple bacon donuts, about innovation in the legal industry. What was different about this event was its focus on the outcome of innovation versus the shiny objects and announcements (despite what Haley Altman and Christian Lang revealed) that often garner the attention of the press, law firm leaders and in-house teams. With a superstar roster of speakers from every area of the industry, Professor Daniel Katz (@computational) kicked off Thursday’s event and the Tweet storm that followed with a message about a more scientific approach to law.
Radical Collaboration
Throughout the day a few themes emerged from every area of the legal ecosystem - from legal educators to all flavors of legal service providers to in-house counsel. To #MakeLawBetter we all must work together and learn from each other. No one of us has the answer. Until educators, technologists, lawyers and business people can learn to build on each other’s ideas, many of the obstacles to meaningful innovation will remain. Cat Moon (@inspiredcat), Director of Innovation Design at Vanderbilt Law School’s PoLI Institute, delivered a passionate, provocative message that we can go “faster and farther together,” citing the sheer scale of the need for legal services and the range of issues that need to be addressed, including the mental health challenges facing legal professionals.
Lisa Colpoys (@lcolpoys), the Program Director for the Institute for the Future of Law Practice (IFLP), and John Mayer (@johnpmayer), the Executive Director at the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), each echoed this theme highlighting the need to develop more T-Shaped lawyers with diverse skill-sets and how open source software provides students and citizens a greater opportunity to engage in learning the law. Professor Nicole Morris (@nicolenmorris3), the Director of TI:GER at Emory University School of Law, drove home the need for multidisciplinary teams. She described how Emory’s long standing program had enabled engineering, law and business majors to collaborate on actual business problems and pursue the commercialization of a number of technologies. In a nutshell to #MakeLawBetter lawyers should know the Law + [something].
In private practice this [something] is often a combination of business acumen (finance, project management, process improvement, etc.), economics (business development, pricing, etc.) and/or proficiency in the technology/data science space. Jae Um (@jaesunum), Director of Pricing Strategy at Baker McKenzie, delivered a fascinating analysis of why real innovation is happening in the legal industry by teasing out the longer term pattern of investment in legal technology startups. To explore her hypothesis about legal technology entering a Cambrian era (with a humorous nod to the Godfather of Legal Operations) read her article. Jae Um reiterated that building legal technology solutions is hard work due to the required domain expertise, takes courage and empathy and requires patience – a key attribute often absent from many of our conversations around legal innovation. Haley Altman, CEO at Doxly, Liam Brown, the Founder and Executive Chairman at Elevate, and Christian Lang, Head of Strategy at Reynen Court, rounded out the conversations about how the legal technology ecosystem is evolving towards consolidation and platformization (for more on this topic see Lang’s referenced McKinsey’s articles.
Empathize with Customers and Calibrate Resources
Second, to #MakeLawBetter we must start by understanding the real, if unspoken, needs of the people we serve whether they be citizen advocates, students, lawyers, other professionals or the business people many of us at the conference ultimately serve. Turning to a familiar phrase in the innovation space, Carlos Gamez (@chgamez), the Client & Partner Lead on the Legal Technology Innovation team at Thomson Reuters condensed this theme into: How Might We overcome delivery hurdles? At Allstate Gerard Gregoire, the Vice President & Assistant General Counsel, spoke about “courageous leadership” that calibrated risk and used data to drive behavior in order to collapse the time required for his in-house team to complete their legal work. His approach emphasized the prioritization of projects and resources and focused on whether a solution makes it easier for the employee, business user or end customer to engage with the company.
Sometimes, making law better means that a legal solution isn’t needed at all. Jeff Carr (@CarrNext), the Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Univar Solutions, urged the audience to develop more “sustainable behavior,” so that lawyers could focus solely on performing necessary legal work. His mantra: “Does it need to be done? Now? By me?” resonated with much of the audience. To #MakeLawBetter Carr focused on “delivered value” instead of firefighting, where the law department puts in place protocols and procedures to ultimately prevent legal problems from happening in the first place.
Likewise, Dennis Garcia (@DennisCGarcia), Assistant General Counsel at Microsoft, spoke of how his team embraces Satya Nadella’s (Microsoft’s CEO) message that “Ours is not an industry that respects tradition – it only respects innovation.” He mentioned how the legal department had focused on collaborating better using Microsoft’s technology suite to build workflow solutions for their business customers. By focusing on user adoption and data, Garcia’s team was able to maximize the use of their existing resources.
Experiment and Learn from Failure
Finally, to #MakeLawBetter we must experiment more and learn from failure. Although co-creation has been a theme within the legal innovation space for some time, it is often reserved for large, high-priority projects instead of one’s day to day work. Having recently spent some time learning from the design team at IDEO, to truly embrace a growth mindset radical collaboration through experimentation should be fundamental to our habits of work.
While a number of speakers touched on this theme throughout the day, Cat Moon delivered the most compelling call to action during her afternoon session, providing real world examples from Failure Camp and The Escambia Project. She challenged everyone in the audience (and anyone reading this post) to Experiment Out Loud. To write down one experiment you can do today and to send it to her through MakeLawBetter.org or on Twitter @inspiredcat. She will compile the submissions for the community to learn from.
If this conference proposed a secret sauce as a recipe for innovation, the main ingredients would include multidisciplinary, team-based work, understanding the real needs of the people we aim to serve, and learning through experimentation and failure. To #MakeLawBetter will require a concerted effort across the ecosystem to put these principles into practice on a regular basis, so that innovation is aligned with the needs of citizens and businesses and overcomes the hurdles of service delivery. And, all of this will require great patience.
