A faster horse
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JC pontificates about technology
An occasional series.
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How many keen fintech[1] startups and management strategies are dedicated to automating, digitising, and triaging an existing legal process.
The solutions we see, be they document assembly, chat-bots, right-shoring, outsourcing — take an existing legal process (say contract negotiation) and try to enhance it by substituting cheaper, faster, components (be it hardware, software or meatware) but never once looking at waste.
We have a horse; our customers want it faster — and cheaper.
In either case you sacrifice (expensive) expertise and institutional knowledge for a notional cost reduction and gain in speed.
But you also sacrifice organisational simplicity:
- For the new software, you must buy kit and integrate software into a existing, creaking tech architecture.
- Your procurement and technology estate maintenance costs go up.
- For the meatware you acquire service provider contracts, SLAs, overseas offices in Romania, Belfast and Bangalore and yet more demands on your tech architecture.
But make no mistake, folks: you still have a horse. In fact, a donkey. The fastest donkey in the world still don’t go fast. The donkey is slow, because donkeys are slow. The donkey is expensive because donkeys are expensive. You could have the finest ostlers, stable-hands, jockeys and breeders, and you could pay them a pittance, but you would still have a donkey.
The donkey in this case is the complexity of your templates, your policies, your credit standards, your client selection.