Talk:Legal services delivery

We hear a lot about the shifting emphasis from “legal service” to “legal service delivery”, either by “right-shoring” or by using tech. But this is to treat legal problems, and the commercial interactions that drive them, as if they are merely complicated systems that can be solved by rules, whereas they are complex, and cannot be solved by rules.

But before we look changing delivery mechanisms, we should first look at these problems and how we have currently configured our legal services and processes to deal with them.

Where legal processes are over-engineered, over-complicated, excessively cautious – which is, basically, everywhere – then wherever they are carried out and however they are delivered, they will be burdensome and wasteful, and will cause confusion, delay and expense. Right-shoring won’t fix that, and is more likely to make it worse.

Requiring less expensive, less experienced people to handle these over-engineered processes will create not just additional waste, in terms of approvals, escalation and audit workflows, but significant additional risk.

Simplifying existing legal processes by de-cluttering documents, writing them in plain language, removing unnecessary protections and options – with a view to standardising and commoditising the legal product itself, not its “delivery”, will allow us to recast the algorithmic components not as not legal processes at all, but operational processes, which may be automated but, at any rate, do not need legal department involvement at all. We have good examples of where we have achieved this to great effect.

Those legal processes that can’t be simplified should not be right-shored, but instead should be handled by subject matter experts, treating the system (as it is) a complex, dynamic one, with non-linear interconnections and risk, which require experienced people to exercise expert judgments in real time.