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This is partly because the yen to be [[thought leader|thought-leading]]s [[agent]]s for [[step-change]] in their industry, plays to a [[general counsel]]’s innate credulity and weakness for flattery, but has a profounder operating cause: [[reg tech]] struggles mightily with a business model that ''scales''. [[Reg tech|reg tech]] strives to automate [[tedious]], repetitive and manual tasks, thereby removing a significant cost item from the departmental budget, and accelerating and improving the output quality at the same time. The idea is to [[disintermediate]], taking out expensive, unreliable, high-maintenance machinery and replacing it with does the same job for nothing. | This is partly because the yen to be [[thought leader|thought-leading]]s [[agent]]s for [[step-change]] in their industry, plays to a [[general counsel]]’s innate credulity and weakness for flattery, but has a profounder operating cause: [[reg tech]] struggles mightily with a business model that ''scales''. [[Reg tech|reg tech]] strives to automate [[tedious]], repetitive and manual tasks, thereby removing a significant cost item from the departmental budget, and accelerating and improving the output quality at the same time. The idea is to [[disintermediate]], taking out expensive, unreliable, high-maintenance machinery and replacing it with does the same job for nothing. | ||
If you are buying that product “off the shelf” — assuming it can already do what its vendors claim; by no means a given — observe where the vendor’s energy is going: exclusively, ''sales''. They are costlessly reprinting something they made earlier, and proposing to charge you a licence for it, per seat, per use, or per time period. On this model, there is only one way to make decent amount of money: by ''extracting rent''. Now this would be fine, of course, if the product | If you are buying that product “off the shelf” — assuming it can already do what its vendors claim; by no means a given — observe where the vendor’s energy is going: exclusively, ''sales''. They are costlessly reprinting something they made earlier, and proposing to charge you a licence for it, per seat, per use, or per time period. On this model, there is only one way to make decent amount of money: by ''extracting [[rent]]''. Now this would be fine, of course, if the product ''did'' work as billed, and intelligently anticipated your particular applications, and handled them quickly, quietly and immaculately right out of the box. | ||
But, of course, they don’t. It is a common experience, when you finally get to play with it, that a reg tech application ''doesn’t quite do what you want it to''. Either your intended | But, of course, they don’t. It is a common experience, when you finally get to play with it, that a [[reg tech]] application ''doesn’t quite do what you want it to''. Either ''your'' intended use isn’t ''quite'' the one the vendor had in mind, and the product can’t ''quite'' do it and isn’t flexible enough for you to reconfigure it — call this a “'''misalignment'''” problem — or it ''can'', but to get the application to be of any use, it will need a good deal of energy, expertise and effort from ''your'' people to configure or train it; energy [[change adoption|they will be disinclined to provide]] — call this a “'''configuration'''” problem. | ||
Misalignment and configuration are different problems, but most [[reg tech]] offerings suffer from both, because they both stem from the same fact of life: while there is an unquantifiably huge volume of [[tedium]] to be automated, ''no two instances of [[tedium]] are quite alike''. {{maxim|Tedium is particular, not generic}}. ''That is '''why''' it is [[tedious]]''. If the same instance of [[tedium]] were common to enough market participants that a glib [[SaaS]] solution could fix it, ''it would have been fixed by now''. Fixable tedium is not stable. Persistent tedium ''is'' stable. Notwithstanding breathtaking claims to the contrary from people who should really know better — who ''do'', in fact — this has been the story of technological progress in the legal industry in the last thirty years. ''Pace'' [[Allen & Overy]]’s [[thought-leader]]s there has been ''tons'' of legal technology. The [[BlackBerry]]. Citrix. Document comparison. Document management. Optical character recognition. Voice recognition. Cloud computing. Remote access. Working from home. Skype. Virtual deal rooms. e-Discovery. Legal process outsourcing. All things that effectively, quickly and cheaply solve generic problems, that are intuitive, that boost productivity from the get-go. | |||
====Misalignment==== | ====Misalignment==== | ||
The [[JC]] has lost count of the products that do a job, but just not quite the one you’d like them to. Document assembly packages that oblige you to create document structures in their application rather than in Microsoft Word, or can’t handle columns. Document management systems without APIs to your own systems. Workflow systems that can’t handle parallel routing. Document extraction engines that can’t handle regular expressions. In each case we need this kind of functionality to apply the application to our particular, counter-intuitive and often baffling circumstances. Our institutions ''shouldn’t'' be counter-intuitive or baffling of course, and it is hardly the [[reg tech]] provider’s fault, ''but they are''. They are complex organic systems with a tendency to complicatedness. Every bureaucratic firm is bureaucratic in its own way. | |||
====Configuration==== | |||
Configuration problems tend to be ones that attend the use of [[artificial intelligence]]. Again, [[thought leader]]s<ref>See {{author|Daniel Susskind}}’s {{br|A World Without Work}} for the classic case of this.</ref> see the ''abstract'' appeal of [[artificial intelligence]] while disregarding the challenges of the ''particular''. Neural networks need to be ''trained''. This is a slow, laborious, painstaking job. To extract a [[Rehypothecation|re-hypothecation]] formula from a database of thousands of random [[prime brokerage agreement]]s, for example, Is doable if you have on hand a specialist with a sophisticated understanding not only of legal language and market practice but also of regular expressions and PHP, who is prepared to spend weeks training the neural network to get it started. | |||
===Then there’s [[blockchain]], of course=== | ===Then there’s [[blockchain]], of course=== | ||