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Legal services delivery: Difference between revisions
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But here is the thing. 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'', but on how ''difficult'' it is. It is ''not'' difficult to do clever things with a computer: all you need is a computer — and maybe a Java coder from Bucharest you found on ''UpWork''. But all anyone ''else'' needs is a Romanian Java dude and a computer. Computers are cheap. Romanian Java | The marginal return on an activity is not a function of how intrinsically ''clever'', but on how ''difficult'' it is. It is ''not'' difficult to do clever things with a computer: all you need is a computer — and maybe a Java coder from Bucharest you found on ''UpWork''. But all anyone ''else'' needs is a Romanian Java-dude and a computer. Computers are cheap. Romanian Java-dudes 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, and paid your Java guy, the marginal value of your pizza will equal its marginal cost of production — that is to say, ''nil''. it will fall to 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. | 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''. | 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''. | ||
The folks in reg tech have this exact problem, too: the business model doesn’t work. You can’t continue to extract an annuity out of a quick bit of coding you bought from a guy you found on UpWork. No-one will pay for it. So you have no option but to extract ''[[rent]]''. It’s a bum model. Hence: [[Why is reg tech so disappointing?|reg tech remains disappointing]]. | |||
===But the shifting buzz, man=== | ===But the shifting buzz, man=== | ||
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{{sa}} | {{sa}} | ||
*[[School-leaver from Bucharest]] | *[[School-leaver from Bucharest]] | ||
*[[Why is reg tech so disappointing?]] | |||
{{ref}} | {{ref}} | ||