When it comes to the Humanization of the Law, I cannot help but think of my first few years as a junior associate in legal services. My work was often about browsing through documents and data in order to find keywords, numbers or other pieces of information. Although it was all available in a digital format, I preferred to work with printouts and my multi-colour set of highlighters (I still do).
I often wonder if future junior associates will still have to do this sort of work. For it seems all but certain that such repetitive tasks will increasingly be delegated to technology.
At first glance, the idea of ever-increasing automation seems like something to look forward to. Who wouldn’t want to trade grinding monotony for stimulating think-pieces and substantial contributions to cases?
But entry-level tasks are traditionally used to make sure graduates integrate into the workplace well. Since there is only so much a formal education can teach, the rookie stage is typically needed before more demanding work can be mastered. What may seem like a waste of time at first ideally offers the required skill-building and earning. After all, there is a salary payment to be justified.
So, the result of the digital transformation we can see today may well be the following question: assuming traditional rookie services will be less and less required, how can entry-level professionals continue to earn a salary and progress on the learning curve?
It is presently impossible to answer this question with any degree of certainty, of course.
One way to approach it, however, might be to remain optimistic and expect legal services to change rather than to disappear. Many industries have undergone considerable transformation only to find that modified products and services were even more in demand than the traditional kind. IBM’s transition from mainframe producer to a software and service provider is a classic example. While the challenges the legal services industry currently faces shouldn’t be downplayed, there is no reason to believe such a transition is out of reach.
While much is still unknown, it is obvious that the future tasks of junior associates will depend on how the legal consulting industry develops.
In particular, they will require a different skill set due to the changing nature of legal services and how they are delivered. If the past few years are any indication, these requirements will not replace the traditional skills necessary for a legal career but come on top. This is to say that entry-level professionals will have to be accomplished lawyers and something else as well.
Given the time and financial investment a legal education requires even in its classic form, prospective law students have a right to understand what is expected of them and to know how to successfully prepare for the altered service landscape. So, the various stakeholders currently engaged in the digital transformation of legal services should get involved and describe their own key take-aways from the changes they witness: what may be currently missing from educational curricula, what can be said about training on the job, which sort of skills should become more and more important?
Against this background, the idea for this article grew around my work in and with IT platforms for specific and well-known workflows—or rather the pain points businesses typically identify therein. Users can log in through a web page and find specific products or processes ready for use. At first glance, this does not seem to affect legal services since it concentrates on the underlying business matter.
Nothing could be further from the truth! In fact, the business model is nothing short of a revolution on a scale not seen in legal consulting since the middle ages.
Like any other member of the liberal professions, legal advisors make a living by providing access to specialist knowledge. Short of studying the matter themselves, clients traditionally have no choice but to retain the services of one such person or another.
The three software solutions selected for this contribution, however, provide platforms with standardized knowledge for typical cases—material which would otherwise have to be sourced from human specialists.
Such classic input is typically bespoke and valid only at a certain point in time for one particular set of facts. The platforms, on the other hand, provide standardized value for typical cases embedded in typical workflows. They are continuously updated and expanded as time goes on.
So, the software solutions presented here address a specific matter by dividing the related caseload into standard and non-standard cases before human advisors have any say about it.
Standard cases are supposed to function automatically without further assistance, just as if they had been assessed on a bespoke basis in times of old. This is not about simply pre-processing data so the advisors can have a look at it. The platforms propose to automate the very procedure of consulting standard cases by providing the solution upfront, in a scalable format and for a fraction of the fee.
Non-standard cases still do provide opportunities for classic consulting to human advisors, provided they find themselves highlighted, recommended, or better yet selected by the platform.
The best strategy to reach this position on the platform is to provide the standardized value users are looking for. This will not immediately result in payouts, but rather require a substantial investment.
What a fundamental change! Being used to a monopoly on specialist knowledge clients simply cannot source otherwise, most legal advisors would much rather ask clients to pay the time they spend analyzing the specific case at hand—again, again and again, until they retire. They now have to rationalize themselves out of the bulk of cases by providing free input they may well be held liable for given the masses of cases it should be applied to. Since all they get in exchange is a rather vague promise of billable hours distributed through the platform, most are somewhat underwhelmed.
These underlying thoughts are anything but new, of course, and have been highlighted by thought leaders for years (See for example Suesskind, Patrick, 2010, The end of lawyers, 2nd edition, Oxford.).
What is interesting in the current phase is that platform models show a progression. They started out from well-defined bases in subject matters of no major significance to legal consulting but have been steadily increasing in relevance and value provided. Once users make the conversion to platform use, they typically are not coming back, but ask for more. Indeed, the three solutions selected show that core areas of legal consulting are no longer off-limits.
This is even more relevant to future junior associates. The work they have traditionally been assigned is primarily about understanding and mastering standard cases, a necessary step if they want to make an impact in non-standard constellations.
In order to provide some insight of value to future graduates in this and related developments, three questions need to be answered:
1.
What do providers of platform solutions have to say to prospective legal graduates?
2.
What does this specific change have to teach us in terms of necessary skills and how they are put to use as part of a career?
3.
What new roles and positions are currently being created on the basis of these skills?
To answer these questions, this paper will first analyse use cases of tools and/or IT solutions which are already in the market, affecting rookie services. In a second part, it will show what can be inferred in terms of on-top skills from these examples. Finally, it will look to new job roles currently emerging.
Each of these topics is built around a series of interviews with professionals from the field, sharing their experiences and views. While most of the questions asked will be identical in each respective section, some have been modified to better express what the interviewee wanted to communicate.
