Bloomberg, Technology

What's Possible: An Introduction

Please welcome David Perla, president of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg BNA’s Legal division, to the pages of Above the Law.

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Ed. note: Please welcome our newest columnist, Bloomberg BNA’s David Perla, who will contribute on a monthly basis to Above the Law’s continually expanding coverage of legal technology.

A few years ago, Penn Law School asked me to give a talk on possible career paths in the law. I was honored by the invitation, to be sure. But when it came to the subject matter, I wasn’t certain I could offer any forward-looking advice.

I received my J.D. from Penn in 1994. Things have changed a lot since then, back when Forrest Gump ruled the box office. The newsmakers of the day included Boris Yeltsin, O.J. Simpson, and Tonya Harding. Gas was cheap and Hillary Clinton was being investigated. Okay, yes, those last two may sound eerily familiar, but the point is, 1994 was a long time ago. And as third-year law students, my classmates and I had absolutely no idea what was in store for us.

Between graduation from Penn and that speech, I had done two things that were a bit off the “Biglaw” beaten path. First, I had become the vice president of business and legal affairs of an Internet company, the jobs website Monster.com. Second, I had gone on to co-found a legal outsourcing company, Pangea3, which performed work from India. They were both rewarding and exciting endeavors. Funny thing, though — neither existed — nor was even remotely imaginable — in 1994.

Monster.com was a name brand by the time I left in 2004, but a decade earlier it was inconceivable that Internet-based companies would play such a prominent role in the economy, let alone staff GC positions. Put it this way: Monster.com was first registered in 1994, and was one of the first 500 domain names ever registered. In 1994, we were browsing the Internet on Netscape Navigator. Those of you old enough to remember that product will recall just how exotic yet rudimentary a place the World Wide Web was at the time. (If you’re too young to remember Navigator, just imagine the Model T of browsers.)

Likewise, in 1994 outsourcing was nothing like the phenomenon it is today. In fact, it wasn’t a phenomenon at all. No one gave a thought to doing substantive work offshore until the late 1990s, when the Y2K scare was in effect. Even then, legal process outsourcing didn’t exist, and it didn’t accelerate until the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the recession-inspired cost-cutting at the largest legal departments and law firms. To predict all that in 1994, well, you’d need a clearer crystal ball than I ever had.

Of course, I understand why Penn asked me to talk about alternative career paths — I’ve been on one for a while now. And I’m excited at the opportunity to pop up now and again on Above the Law with thoughts on “What’s Possible” (the title for this column) in the legal world. Thankfully, my work puts me in a position to think about big questions, like:

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  • How can lawyers make use of data to perform their jobs?
  • How will the development of artificial intelligence affect the practice of law?
  • What’s possible for law students, women and minority attorneys, law firm COOs, and litigators and other practitioners?
  • Where is the dividing line between legal tasks that can be automated and those that must be performed by humans?

These are the subjects that I run into at Bloomberg Law, and they are the kinds of subjects that I may touch on here. But just to be clear: I won’t be predicting the future.

I have only a slightly better sense of what the future holds now than I did in 1994. None of us can know what the profession or business of law is going to look like 21 years from now, or 50 years from now, or 100 years from now. As my experience shows, we can’t even say what kind of jobs will exist in the future. We can be certain of this, though: we’re inventing that future today.

So while I won’t make predictions, I’m excited to talk about “What’s Possible.” Stay tuned.

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David Perla is the President of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg BNA’s Legal division. Perla plays a key leadership role in the continued growth of the company’s legal business, which includes legal, legislative, and regulatory news analysis and the flagship Bloomberg Law technology platform. You can reach David at dPerla@bna.com and follow him on Twitter at @davidperla.

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