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Legal services delivery: Difference between revisions
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{{a|devil| | {{a|devil| | ||
[[File:Legal pizza.jpg|450px|thumb|center|“Your [[CDO squared]], sir. Would you like a monoline wrap with that?”]] | [[File:Legal pizza.jpg|450px|thumb|center|“Your [[CDO squared]], sir. Would you like a monoline wrap with that?”]] | ||
}}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 | }}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 is the logistics of getting the [[pizza]] — sorry, I mean “complex legal work product” — into the consumer’s gob. | ||
In what follows, | In what follows, where I put “pizza” you could read “complex legal work product”, but for some reason the argument makes ''so'' much more sense when you put “[[pizza]]”. | ||
===It’s ''not'' about the pizza.=== | ===It’s ''not'' about the pizza.=== | ||
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:''“More recently the buzz and effort has shifted from innovation in legal expertise (inventing [[derivatives]], [[CDO]]s and so on) to how the services that embed that expertise are delivered.”'' | :''“More recently the buzz and effort has shifted from innovation in legal expertise (inventing [[derivatives]], [[CDO]]s and so on) to how the services that embed that expertise are delivered.”'' | ||
The learned authors seem to recognise that true legal innovation and sophisticated real-time reaction to emerging legal | The learned authors seem to recognise that true legal innovation and sophisticated real-time reaction to emerging legal quandaries, are (or, in the good old days, ''were'') less susceptible to the “march of the [[chatbot]]s” — [[A&O]] raked a fair few millions cranking out [[CDO]]s, after all — but have concluded, by means of a crystal ball wholly inaccessible to those of us at the coalface, that it’s all changed now. It’s like they suppose we’ve somehow solved the game, there are no mysteries left: one can only now add value by supersizing, adding fries, or getting the delivery guy to go faster for less money. ''It’s not about the pizza''. | ||
===It ''is'' about the pizza.=== | ===It ''is'' about the pizza.=== | ||
But here is the thing. It ''is'' about the pizza. | But here is the thing. It ''is'' about the pizza. | ||
The marginal return on | The marginal return on any 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 if you can do it, so can anyone ''else'' if they get themselves a computer and an account on ''UpWork''. Computers are cheap. Romanian Java coders 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''. This will happen not just gradually, over a period of time, but ''immediately''. Ask Kodak.<ref>Kodak ''invented'' the digital camera. It still killed them.</ref> Ask people who used to 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 [[cheapest to deliver|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 | The point about real legal work is that you ''can’t'' get a computer to do it. If you could, ''it wouldn’t be legal work''.<ref>I could pause here to pick a fight with the Susskind clan, but it would spoil the flow. But the essence of the argument is this: what counts as legal work is inherently dynamic. It changes through time. It is a function of non-linear interactions in complex systems. What counts as legal work is not just hard to predict ahead of time: it is ''impossible''.</ref> Legal work is — always has been — about edge cases; conundrums; things no-one expected. Bespoke situations spinning out of non-contiguities and interactions between moving parts that no-one expected to move. To be sure, part of a lawyer’s job should be to identify those parts of the ecosystem than ''can'' be tamed, and to prepare the land for farming: 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''. Lawyers are ''bushwhackers''. Lawyers are ''pioneers''. | ||
The folks in reg tech have this exact problem, too: | The folks in [[reg tech]] have this exact problem, too: their 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 try to extract ''[[rent]]''. But, ''problem'': the reason anyone wants [[reg tech]] is to intermediate an ''existing'' [[rent-seeker]]. 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=== | ||