Legal services delivery
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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.
In what follows, please feel free to read “piece of complex legal analysis” for “pizza”.
It’s not about the pizza.
Here’s a quote from those luminaries of the legal future, Allen & Overy:[1]
- “More recently the buzz and effort has shifted from innovation in legal expertise (inventing derivatives, CDOs 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 chatbots” — A&O raked a fair few millions cranking out CDOs, 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 can only adds value if not by supersizing or adding fries, but by getting a cheaper delivery guy. It’s not about the pizza.
It is 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 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 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.
The irony of the ineffable
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; 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.