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Legal services delivery: Difference between revisions
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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. | 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 | 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. | 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. | ||