Legal services delivery: Difference between revisions
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
||
Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
{{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> | |||
:''“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. | |||
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 | 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 | ===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. | |||
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]]''. | |||
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.” | |||
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. |