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The Alternative Legal IT Conference, produced by LexisNexis for mid-sized law firms, was my first experience of a legal IT two-day country hotel conference and it was a highly civilised and well-organised event. When I looked at the programme, I was immediately interested in hearing the keynote speeches from legal services market entrants.
After several years of the same people making similar (albeit polished) presentations at various Legal IT events year after year, a few progressive event organisers have been booking speakers from outside the industry whose appeal lies in the fact that they are potentially thought provoking. Their presentations focus on a single theme: the future of legal IT.
This event brought us back to the present, where the pace of change in the legal sector has been accelerated by deregulation, and dynamic market entrants such as Cooperative Legal Services (CLS) and Rocket Lawyer, whose keynote presentations outlined their technology driven, customer-centric legal services models. We heard about two different approaches to technology: Rocket Lawyer created its own IT systems and processes, while CLS bought and adapted legal-specific solutions.
Co-operative Legal Services – a trusted brand
Jeremy Williams, IT project lead for the Co-operative Legal Services family law business, reminded us of the Co-operative Group’s core business areas: food, banking and insurance, funeral care and pharmacy. CLS is designed to reflect the the Co-op’s ethical core values and trusted brand. It has 450 employees, so it is quite small compared with top 50 law firms, and plans to expand to 3,000 within five years. Its main practice areas target a familiar market: will writing, PI, probate and estate administration, conveyancing and employment. Its family law practice launched last week.
Williams explained how technology supports CLS in five key areas: competition, customer experience, staffing, growth – and distribution channels.
The CLS core technology platform is designed for stability and scalability and includes enterprise case and matter management, document management, practice management, infrastructure and telephony.
Williams highlighted CLS’ customer-centric approach as a significant differentiator. It is supported by effective data management and BI and integrated CRM with a digital layer and leverages the Co-op’s membership base and multi-product service offering. Interactive tools enhance the customer experience and reporting and MI applications build and maintain customer satisfaction and service levels.
Staffing models are an important consideration as fixed fees require a focus on efficiency – and applying the right level of experience to each function. Williams emphasised the need for a careful balance between experienced lateral hires and junior colleagues. This strategic priority is supported by automated workflows, support and monitoring tools for risk management and easily accessible knowledge tools – legal precedents and other resources are integrated into workflows and accessible via the desk top.
As CLS lawyers work from multiple locations and legal services are delivered through a variety of distribution channels, collaboration tools are a critical component.
Williams recognised that legal IT lags behind retail technology and for CLS this is a strategic advantage. While the Co-operative Group lags behind ASDA and Tesco in terms of its online retail offering, CLS is way ahead of most law firms – and it is only at the start of its journey.
One interesting question is why CLS chose to purchase software rather than develop its own technology. The response was although the Co-operative Group does develop its own software where necessary, legal-specific software from Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis and others was a good fit and could be implemented quickly.
When asked whether CLS planned to handle higher-value work, Williams’ cautious response was that taking on complex cases could comprise the Co-op’s brand identity in its core market. The discussion moved naturally from branding to marketing: how do your customers know about your service offering? As well as leveraging contacts from other parts of the group, CLS continues to develop referral partnerships.
While Williams’ presentation referred to IT resources that are familiar to most law firms, his responses highlighted the difference in strategic focus. CLS is shaping its business to its core market and concentrating on cross-selling. This seems straightforward, but only because Co-operative Group has done it before, crossing over from pure retail into other core services.
Surviving on the high street
We then heard from Berni Summers, managing partner of three-partner practice John Welch and Stammers – the first law firm to receive an ABS licence. The firm applied for ABS to allow Summers, a non-lawyer, to become a partner. How can high street firms compete with new market entrants? By remaining small and offering partner experience and efficient service at a competitive price. It is about genuinely personalised service and value for money. It is not about marketing. Almost all of John Welch and Stammers business comes from word of mouth recommendation.
As managing partner, Summers is responsible for all the firm’s infrastructure, including IT. The firm needs reliable, efficient technology to support business continuity and efficiency and keep costs down, but they do not have – or want to employ – IT support. The obvious answer is outsourced IT services and Summers is currently in discussion with cloud providers.
There is clearly a place in the new legal services landscape for small, forward-thinking firms like John Welch and Stammers. An analogy can be drawn with the convenience store. As supermarket grew bigger there were those who predicted the demise of the local shop that stayed open late. But this didn’t happen because people still required local out-of-hours shopping. Surviving on the high street is also about customer loyalty which is relatively high in legal services, particularly in the consumer sector.
Rocket Lawyer – automatic for the people
The second keynote speaker was Dr Mark Edwards, Corporate VP and General Manager of Rocket Lawyer, a successful US online legal services provider that is launching in the UK in November. Rocket Lawyer is looking to lower the access barrier to legal advice.
The UK spends more online per capita than any other country, so Charley Moore, Rocket Lawyer’s founder and chairman, decided it would be an ideal market for his self-service online legal services offering. Rocket Lawyer is targeting a latent market comprising consumers and small businesses. According to Edwards, “People are afraid of the cost and they are afraid of lawyers!” Consequently, two thirds of the UK population does not have a valid will and over half of UK general partnerships do not have a legal agreement.
Rocket Lawyer is a freemium online model. The customer completes an online interview. The responses populate a basic document which is then customised to individual circumstances. The first document is free – then there is a choice of subscription and pay-as-you-go models.
“Rocket Lawyer is a VC-backed data company,” says Edwards. “Our business is collecting, using, analysing and targeting data,” and is driven by technology:
Rocket Lawyer builds its own proprietary technology, with the content created by lawyers and copywriters.
I asked Edwards about Rocket Lawyer’s technology. A UK version of the original US platform has been developed from scratch for the UK market. Rocket Lawyer employs its own lawyers for product development and the UK team was able to leverage the US team and its consultants. Why did they develop their own technology – twice? Edwards considers it important to have complete control over all processes. The platform is continually improved to enhance collaboration between lawyers and customers. His biggest challenge was getting the online service up and running in just six months and recruiting in a busy market.
The online service is supplemented by the recently launched Rocket Lawyer On Call™ whereby Rocket Lawyer members who will be able to speak to a lawyer free for the first half hour, and then be taken on as a paying client of the firm. Panel firms have agreed to reduce their hourly rate in exchange for referrals.
Rocket Lawyer On Call™ is not looking to compete with law firms, but rather to target low-margin work and a latent customer base and channel the work to good firms. Edwards considers this to be a win-win for Rocket Lawyer, firms and customers. Rocket Lawyer has developed scalable technology to automate the bulk of the effort involved in low-margin, price sensitive work. “It’s about helping customers to help themselves.”
The keynotes were followed by plenary panel discussions on how IT departments are leading their firms’ response to the challenges of the new legal services landscape and the value of broadening the IT director role to include operations and facilities.
Lunch and ‘Lean’
At lunchtime I caught up with Peter Blackwell, Head of IT at ASB Law, who explained how he was engaging lawyers and others in process improvements that supported the firm’s ‘Lean’ programme. ‘Lean’ representatives from each department propose suggestions for improvements from their teams to a full-time ‘Lean’ analyst. Some 130 suggestions had produced 60 improvements. This was a direct example of how mid-market law firms are applying ‘big business’ strategy to their operations – business process re-engineering supported by strong internal communications.
After lunch I had coffee in the garden with Chris Bull, senior consultant at Edge International and an expert on legal process management. His experience confirmed my impression that most firms are involved in some kind of process improvement.
This was reinforced by a quick walk around the supplier exhibition. I spoke to representatives from Thomson Reuters Elite, Linetime, IRIS and Phoenix BS, whose products are designed to help firms streamline, automate and integrate business processes and support collaboration, compliance and risk management.
Roundtable sessions
In the afternoon, the meeting broke out into roundtable discussions. These were repeated to enable delegates to participate in four out of the eight sessions. It was striking to see how crowded these were. Perhaps it was because this was a residential event, but I have been to conferences where everyone disperses for private meetings after the keynotes and break-out discussions are sparsely attended. I spent some time following the discussions on BYOD (bring your own device) and social media – the latter was led by Jon Bloor of Prettys Solicitors, who I talk to on twitter. It was great to meet him and see participants’ interest and enthusiasm.
One of the most popular sessions was led by leadership team programme manager Adrienne Mansfield, who described Wragge & Co’s recent workflow automation project. Although one case management system – Linetime Liberate – was used to create different workflows for volume and complex work, the main challenge was redesigning processes for diverse working cultures. Consequently the implementation took longer than anticipated, but the benefits to lawyers and clients are clear. Again the critical success factor was effective communication.
Other roundtable topics included IT integration during mergers and acquisitions; cloud services; IT migration; HR systems and financial regulations.
The Silicon Valley of legal IT
Following a (fairly) new legal IT tradition, I end this review with a prediction, this time from Chris Bull. Change brings challenges, but it also drives innovation and the greatest opportunity is in the mid-market and consumer sectors, which are facing competition from new entrants. “The mid-market has the opportunity to become the Silicon Valley of legal IT,” he says. “The consumer market has become the hub of innovation and in three years’ time, top 50 firms will be looking to emulate mid-market firms and recruit the innovators and evangelists in the same way as the big IT companies looked to Silicon Valley ten years ago.”
Thanks again to organisers Steve Parrot and Pauline Singleton and the team at LexisNexis for a useful and enjoyable day and for helping me get additional interviews with the keynote speakers. The venue was perfect and the sessions were topical and interactive, but what made it special were the intangibles: the enthusiastic participation and delegates openly sharing their experiences.
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