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{{a|devil|}}Of a [[legal service]], to deliver it to a [[buyer]], who will ''consume'' it. Like a pizza. A view of the world that sees a lawyer as a dolled-up courier gigging for Deliveroo.
{{a|devil|}}Of a [[legal service]], to deliver it to a [[buyer]], who will ''consume'' it. Like a pizza. A view of the world that sees a lawyer as a dolled-up courier gigging for Deliveroo, and the difficult part of the job logistics of getting the pizza — sorry, I mean piece of complex legal analysis — into the consumer’s gob.
===It’s not about the pizza===
Here’s a quote from those luminaries of the legal future, ''Allen & Overy'':<ref>[https://www.allenovery.com/global/-/media/allenovery/2_documents/advanced_delivery_and_solutions/in-house-legal-function-2019.pdf ''The future of the in-house legal function: an Allen & Overy perspective on the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead'']. (2019)</ref>


Here’s a quote, from those luminaries of the legal future, ''Allen & Overy'':<ref>[https://www.allenovery.com/global/-/media/allenovery/2_documents/advanced_delivery_and_solutions/in-house-legal-function-2019.pdf ''The future of the in-house legal function: an Allen & Overy perspective on the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead'']. (2019)</ref>
:''“More recently the buzz and effort has shifted from innovation in legal expertise (inventing [[derivatives]], [[CDO]]s and so on) to how the services that embed that expertise are delivered.”''
 
The learned authors seem to recognise that true legal innovation, emerging product trends, are (or, in the good old days, ''were'') less susceptible to the “march of the [[chatbot]]s” — [[A&O]] raked a fair few millions cranking out [[CDO]]s, after all — but have concluded, by means of a crystal ball singularly not accessible to those of us at the coalface, that it’s all changed now.
 
One adds value, by supersizing, or adding fries. It’s not about the pizza.
 
But here is the thing. It ''is'' about the pizza.


:''“More recently the buzz and effort has shifted from innovation in legal expertise (inventing [[derivatives]], [[CDO]]s and so on) to how the services that embed that expertise are delivered.”''
The marginal return on an activity is not a function of how intrinsically ''clever'' it is, but on how ''difficult'' it is to do. It is ''not'' difficult to do clever things with a computer. All you need is a computer. But all anyone ''else'' needs is a computer. Computers are cheap. Seeing as that “anyone else” will be a competitor of yours, once you have figured out how to make it with a computer,  the marginal value of your pizza will equal its marginal cost of production — that is to say, nil, not just over time, but ''immediately''. Ask Kodak. Ask the people who make postcards and aerogrammes.
 
If you think there is a money to be made delivering a valueless product more cheaply than any other bugger, you will find yourself in a very fast race to the bottom of a very large tank, with a very hard, very flat, very concrete floor.


The learned authors recognise that true legal innovation, emerging product trends, are — or, in the good old days, ''were'' — less susceptible to the “march of the [[chatbot]]s”, but have concluded, by means of a crystal ball singularly not accessible to this old fool, that it’s all changed now. One adds value, by supersizing, or adding fries.
The point about legal work is that you ''can’t'' do it on a computer. If you can, it isn’t legal work. Legal work is — always has been — about edge cases; conundrums; things no-one expected. Bespoke situations.  To be sure, part of a lawyer’s job should be to commoditise new products, productionise them, and hand them off to operations teams who ''can'' make widgets out of them — but ''lawyers don’t make widgets''.


But here is the thing.
===But the shifting buzz, man===
The reason the “buzz” has “shifted to delivery” is that the people who buzz — [[management consultants]] — have nothing to say about the pizza. The ''content'' of legal services is entirely opaque to them. They have not the first clue about it. The actual law is — by deliberate, cynical design of generations of nest-feathering lawyers — baffling, long-winded and obtuse. It is quite incomprehensible to the management layer. Management must take the lawyers at their word, and the pizza as it comes: whole, ineffable, immutable: an unsolvable brute fact of the universe. A manager cannot say “[[cross default]] is stupid” (though it is). She cannot say “you do not need that absurd [[indemnity]]; you would never use it, and a court would never enforce it,” however much these things may be true.


The marginal return on an activity is not a function of how intrinsically ''clever'' it is, but on how ''difficult'' it is to do. It is ''not'' difficult to do clever things with a computer. All you need is a computer. But all anyone else needs is a computer. Seeing as that anyone else will be a competitor of yours, you will find yourself in a very fast race to the bottom of a very large tank, with a very hard, very flat, very unforgiving concrete floor. The value of anything, however clever, that any fool can do with a computer, without help, will be zero. Ask Kodak. Ask the people who make postcards and aerogrammes.
A manager knows that only one with magic powers can say those things. She can only focus on the things she can understand: how much it costs to hire such a person. But there is a dark inversion to her ignorance. For such is the inscrutability of the legal craft — so impenetrable is this world — that all she can say is one has this magic, or one has not. Those who have it are interchangeable; substitutable; switchable; ''[[fungible]]''.


But value-added legal work is — always has been — about edge cases: new developments. Bespoke situations. It ought to be a truism that “legal” is not part of the operational infrastructure. ''Legal doesn’t make widgets''. To be sure, part of the mandate should be to commoditise new products, productionise them, and hand them off to operations teams who ''can'' make widgets.  
Thus our manager arrives at the notion of ''delivery''. “I must have this ineffable magic,” she realises, “but it could be delivered from London, or Belfast, or Gdansk, a someone rifling through a [[playbook]] on his lap from a service centre on the outskirts of Hanoi.”


The reason the “buzz” has shifted to delivery is that the people making the buzz — [[management consultants]] — have nothing to say about the ''content'' of legal services, having not the first clue about it. The actual law is — by deliberate, cynical design of generations of nest-feathering lawyers — opaque, baffling, long-winded and obtuse. It is quite incomprehensible to a middle manager. She must take the lawyers at their word that it is important, but she must also take it as she finds it: whole, ineffable, immutable: an unsolvable brute fact of the universe, Thus her solution to focus on its delivery — being something she can do something about. she cannot to rationalise it, nor simplify it, nor cauterise the tedious excess with which all legal product overflows — but she ''can'' parcel it up and outsource it to a services center in Manilla.
She cannot rationalise legal product, nor simplify it, nor cauterise it and expunge the [[tedium]] with which all legal product overflows — but she ''can'' parcel it up and outsource it. This is the tragic irony of the ineffability of the law.


But unitising legal product does one of two things: either it really is commoditised, in which case it is a commercial product — a widget — with some legally-relevant content embedded in it, but in respect of which all mysteries have been solved: the value in that product is not in its nuanced legal advice, but it has some other value (else, why “deliver” it at all?) or it really isn’t; there really is some residual legal doubt, uncertainty or risk, in which case handing it off to the proverbial [[School-leaver from Bucharest]] ''really'' isn’t a great idea.
But unitising legal product does one of two things: either it really is commoditised, in which case it is a commercial product — a widget; see above — with some legally-relevant content embedded in it, but in respect of which all mysteries have been solved: the value in that product is not in its nuanced legal advice, but it has some other value (else, why “deliver” it at all?) or it really isn’t; there really is some residual legal doubt, uncertainty or risk, in which case handing it off to the proverbial [[School-leaver from Bucharest]] ''really'' isn’t a great idea.


The ''definition'' of a legal problem is that it ''can’t'' be productionised.  
The ''definition'' of a legal problem is that it ''can’t'' be productionised.  
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