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.
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 recognise that true legal innovation, emerging product trends, are — or, in the good old days, were — less susceptible to the “march of the chatbots”, but have concluded, by means of a crystal ball siongularly not accessible to this old fool, that it’s all changed now. One adds value, by supersizing, or adding fries.
But value-added legal work is — always has been — about edge cases: new developments. Bespoke situations. It ought to be a truism that “legal” is not part of the operational infrastructure. Legal doesn’t make widgets. To be sure, part of the mandate should be to commoditise new products, productionise them, and hand them off to operations teams who can make widgets.
The reason the “buzz” has shifted to delivery is that the people making the buzz — management consultants mostly — have nothing to say about the content of legal services. It is — by deliberate, cynical design by generation of nest-feathering lawyers — made opaque, baffling, long-winded and obtuse. The answer: not to rationalise it, not to simplify it, not to cauterise the tedious excess with which all legal product overflows — but to parcel it up and outsource it to cheaper units offshore.
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.