Vitamins and painkillers
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Crappy advice you find on LinkedIn™
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One that won’t make me nervous
Wondering what to do
One that makes me feel like I feel
When I’m with you
When I’m alone with you
- — Huey Lewis, I Want A New Drug (1984)
The theory goes, so say any number of thought-pieces, that there are two kinds of business offerings: painkillers — that address acute immediate problems, and vitamins — that invisibly guard against problems over the medium to long term.
Opinion is divided as to which is better: painkillers yield quick revenues in the short term but have low barriers to entry and are, thereby on-piste; vitamins generate returns more slowly but are stickier, build better relationships, and might be a more stable source of income over the longer term.
Seeing legal service as something that either masks a deep-seated malaise without fixing it — a “painkiller” — or that is a quick, cheap and hard-to-prove substitute for the boring work of living a healthy lifestyle — a “vitamin” — but anyway overlooking, you know, diagnosing and curing patients is the classic legal-tech take.
This is a threadbare view of the medical profession, let alone the legal world. So, let us extend what may be just a bad metaphor.
Painkillers
Long-term or frequent use of certain pain medications can lead to gastrointestinal problems and kidney damage, and the medication may become less effective over time. Additionally, some painkillers may interact adversely with other medications.
- — ChatGPT, proving it can speak more sense than management consultants
Thus the appeal of Paracetamol: it is quick, generic, asks no great skill of those who prescribe or administer it and, at first blush, it does the trick. A lot like legaltech.
Painkillers work where problems are superficial, baffling or terminal.
Patients with superficial or terminal conditions won’t pay much — at least, not for long.
Where patients have baffling conditions either they are a freak, or you are a bozo. Freaks are the exception, so — yeah.
So here is the JC’s main gripe with the legal operations world: the whole thing presumes that you can solve deep-seated, difficult problems, with generic technology and cheap, low-skill labour.
If this were true, law would not be such a persistently lucrative profession. Everyone would have done this by now.
The cynical view — one, by the way, the JC largely shares — is that most sticky legal problems aren’t all that difficult, addressing not real-world risks, but the interests of legal nest-feathering. Lawyers tell ghost stories and then charge their clients to plan ornate escape routes should these phantasmagoric contingencies come about.
If this is the problem to be fixed, then “optimising how to cater for absurd outcomes” — prescribing painkillers — is not the answer. Any bozo can do that.
Debunking ghost stories, demythologising, untangling knotted organisational threads, sorting wheat from chaff and delivering simple, clear and practical advice — om short, keeping feather-bedding legal eagles out of the picture is what is required.
Not any bozo can do this. This diagnosis, at the best of times, is hard. When the patient institution was forged through countless regrettable mergers, siloed, outsourced, downsized, recombined, spun out, reverse-merged; when it is sclerotic, riven by turf wars, wracked with ancient enmities, haunted by its catastrophic past; when it is bound, encrusted and silted up with the slurry of generations of bad management, lazy governance, mis-engineered process and perfidious, reactionary policy — when the patient presents with a persistent consumptive, hacking wheeze — treating it is even harder. Where do you even start?
This is no time to pop a couple of tramadol and call your legaltechbro in the morning. That will only make things worse.
Vitamins
Most people do not need to take vitamin supplements and can get all the vitamins and minerals they need by eating a healthy, balanced diet.
Painkillers, at least, make a quick, demonstrable difference. Vitamins are more oblique in their quackery: their instant appeal is to sound technical. Since, by design, they aren’t meant to work immediately, patients are usually not disappointed when vitamins don’t.
This offers great scope for intervening causes. By the time the vitamin “effects” are meant to kick in, who knows? The patient could have mended its dissolute ways by itself, in which case you can take the credit. Me and my magic vitamins!
More likely, of course, the patient will have got worse. Even where you haven’t seized the chance to scarper, time allows alternative causal explanations to intrude. Geopolitical events — COVID, Brexit, Ukraine, climate change and so on are great favourites — are easy to cite and magnificently unfalsifiable.
The real business of really restoring vitality is, again, much more work and much less glamour. No patient wants to be told to lay off the booze, cut out the fags, go jogging and eat more vegetables. This is what prudent counsel recommends.
In the meantime, aspirin and vitamins!