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 singularly not accessible to this old fool, that it’s all changed now. One adds value, by supersizing, or adding fries.
But here is the thing.
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. Seeing as that anyone else will be a competitor of yours, you will find yourself in a very fast race to the bottom of a very large tank, with a very hard, very flat, very unforgiving concrete floor. The value of anything, however clever, that any fool can do with a computer, without help, will be zero. Ask Kodak. Ask the people who make postcards and aerogrammes.
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 — have nothing to say about the content of legal services, having not the first clue about it. The actual law is — by deliberate, cynical design of generations of nest-feathering lawyers — opaque, baffling, long-winded and obtuse. It is quite incomprehensible to a middle manager. She must take the lawyers at their word that it is important, but she must also take it as she finds it: whole, ineffable, immutable: an unsolvable brute fact of the universe, Thus her solution to focus on its delivery — being something she can do something about. she cannot to rationalise it, nor simplify it, nor cauterise the tedious excess with which all legal product overflows — but she can parcel it up and outsource it to a services center in Manilla.
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.
The definition of a legal problem is that it can’t be productionised.