Legal services delivery: Difference between revisions

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 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 manages 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; bespoke situations spinning out of non-contiguities and unfortunate reactions 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 fixed, and to prepare the land for tilling: 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: 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]].
+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 disintermediate — that is, ''get rid of'' — an ''existing'' [[rent-seeker]]. ''No-one wants another freaking [[rent-seeker]]''. Hence: [[Why is reg tech so disappointing?|reg tech remains disappointing]].
 ===But the shifting buzz, man===
-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.
+The reason the “buzz” has “shifted to delivery” is that the sort of people who “buzz” are in management, or management consulting, and ''they have nothing to say about [[pizza]].''
+The ''content'' of legal services is entirely opaque to them. The actual law is — by the careful design of generations of nest-feathering<ref>Did I say “nest-feathering”? I meant “[[noble, fearless and brave]].”</ref> lawyers — baffling, long-winded and obtuse. It is quite incomprehensible to the management layer. Management must therefore take the lawyers at their word, and thus they must take the [[pizza]] as they find it it: whole, ineffable, immutable, and stuffed with odd things like artichoke, pineapple and anchovy:<ref>For the record: artichoke yes, anchovy, utterly. But ''pineapple'', a ''never''.</ref> basically,  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.
 A manager knows that only one with magic powers can say those things. She can only focus on the things she can understand: how much it costs to hire such a person.  But there is a dark inversion to her ignorance. For such is the inscrutability of the legal craft — so impenetrable is this world — that all she can say is one has this magic, or one has not. Those who have it are interchangeable; substitutable; switchable; ''[[fungible]]''.