Vitamins and painkillers
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Crappy advice you find on LinkedIn™
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One that won’t make me nervous
Wondering what to do
One that makes me feel like I feel
When I’m with you
When I’m alone with you
- — Huey Lewis, I Want A New Drug (1984)
The theory goes, so say any number of thought-pieces, that there are two kinds of technology business: painkillers — those that address acute immediate problems, and vitamins — those that invisibly guard against problems over the medium to long term.
Seeing legal service as something that either masks a deep-seated malaise without addressing it — a “painkiller” — or a quick, cheap and hard-to-prove substitute for the boring work of living a healthy lifestyle — a vitamin — and in either case overlooking important medical functions such as, you know, diagnosing and curing patients is the classic legal-tech take.
This is a threadbare view of the medical profession, let alone the legal world. Still, let us extend what may be just a bad metaphor.
Painkillers
Long-term or frequent use of certain pain medications can lead to issues such as gastrointestinal problems, kidney damage, and tolerance, where the medication becomes less effective over time. Additionally, some painkillers may interact with other medications you may be taking, leading to adverse effects.
- — ChatGPT
The appeal of Paracetamol: it is quick, generic, asks no great talent of those who prescribe or administer it, and, at first blush, it does the trick. This it shares with legaltech, come to think of it.
Painkillers work where problems are superficial, baffling or terminal.
Patients with superficial or terminal conditions won’t pay much — at least, not for long.
Where patients have baffling conditions either they are a freak, or you are a bozo. By definition, freaks are the exception, so — yeah.
So this is the JC’s main beef with the legal operations world: the whole thing presumes that you can solve deep-seated, difficult problems, with generic technology and cheap labour. If this were true law would not be such a persistently lucrative profession.
The cynical view — one, by the way, the JC largely shares — is that most sticky legal problems aren’t all that difficult, addressing not real-world risks, but the interests of legal nest-feathering. Lawyers tell their clients ghost stories and then charge them for formulating outcomes should their phantasmagoric contingencies come about.
But this being so, the challenge is not “optimising how one caters for absurd outcomes” — any bozo can do that — but demythologising, untangling knotted organisational threads, sorting wheat from chaff and delivering simple advice that clearly allocates risk and keeps feather-bedding legal eagles out of the picture.
Diagnosing this at the best of times is hard. When the patient is a sclerotic institution, forged through countless regrettable mergers, siloed, recombined, spun out, reverse-merged; when it is riven by turf wars, wracked with ancient personal enmities, haunted by past catastrophes; when it silted up with decades of slurry from lackadaisical management, lazy tactics, bad process and superfluous policy — when all presents as persistent consumptive, hacking wheeze — treating it is even harder.
This is no place for legal ops bozos who recommend popping a couple of tramadol and calling in the morning.
Vitamins
Most people do not need to take vitamin supplements and can get all the vitamins and minerals they need by eating a healthy, balanced diet.
Painkillers, at least, make a quick, demonstrable difference. Vitamins are more oblique in their quackery: the instant appeal is that they sound technical. Since, by design, vitamins aren’t meant to work immediately, patients are usually not disappointed when they don’t. This is excellent news for bozo: it gives plenty of time to make good your escape.
It offers, too, great scope for intervening causes: by the time the vitamin “effects” kick in, the patient might have mended its dissolute ways by itself, in which case you can take the credit. Magic vitamins!
In the more likely case the patient has got worse, even where you haven’t seized the chance to scarper, time allows alternative causal explanations to intrude. Geopolitical events — COVID, Brexit, Ukraine, climate change and so on — are easy to cite and magnificently unfalsifiable.
The real business of really causing the kind of benefits vitamins are meant to provide is much more work and much less glamour: No patient wants to be told to lay off the booze, cut out the fags, go jogging and eat more vegetables. This is what prudent counsel recommends.