Legal services delivery: Difference between revisions

In what follows, where I write “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.===

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.===

But here is the thing. It ''is'' about the pizza.

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.

The reason the “buzz” has “shifted to delivery” is that the people who buzz — [[management consultants]] — have nothing to say about the pizza. The ''content'' of legal services is entirely opaque to them. They have not the first clue about it. The actual law is — by deliberate, cynical design of generations of nest-feathering lawyers — baffling, long-winded and obtuse. It is quite incomprehensible to the management layer. Management must take the lawyers at their word, and the pizza as it comes: whole, ineffable, immutable: an unsolvable brute fact of the universe. A manager cannot say “[[cross default]] is stupid” (though it is). She cannot say “you do not need that absurd [[indemnity]]; you would never use it, and a court would never enforce it,” however much these things may be true.