The Typewriter, The Phonograph Record, And The Practice And Business Of Law

Columnist Scott Mozarsky offers 5 examples of how the practice and business of law have changed over the last 10 years.

Remember these?

Remember these?

At Bloomberg BNA, we often talk about how the Bloomberg Law platform enables our users to leverage technology, data and analytics, and AI to change the way they practice law and engage in the business of law. We are not alone. A number of companies innovating in the legal space are developing tools that they contend will alter in some fundamental ways how lawyers work.

As part of our rollout of a new Bloomberg Law search and interface this month, I’ve been speaking with a number of law firm leaders and their clients about how we are changing the way people work in the legal market. And as I say it more and more, I feel the need to hold myself accountable. It is a bold statement to say that your company and others are changing an industry for the better, and without specific examples, it sounds a bit grandiose and superficial. I wonder how such lofty phrasing sounds to attorneys who have been busy doing deals and litigating cases for the last 15 years. To someone so close to their work, change can be difficult to perceive. That’s true even when growth is happening fast. An analogy is an adolescent who doesn’t feel that much taller when her birthday comes around, but when her mom measures her against the kitchen wall, everyone can see the progress.

So for anyone inclined to dismiss folks like me who talk about the changing practice of law (I remember recording my time in a red, hardcover diary as a first-year associate, so I can always point to that), let’s get out a ruler and see where we’re at. Consider these five specific examples of how the practice and business of law have truly changed over the last 10 years:

  1. Selecting outside counsel: Once upon a time, corporate clients chose their counsel primarily on the basis of pre-existing relationships. If you were on the outside looking in, your firm might get lucky to participate in a beauty contest. And yes, a decade ago corporate clients had the guidance of Chambers and scattered other rankings services to assist with the task. But today, the wealth of information available has changed the nature of the selection process drastically. Today’s analytical tools allow clients to see which firms have represented clients in different jurisdictions and in front of different judges as well as the type of transactions and cases they have worked on. As a general counsel, when my company was sued in a jurisdiction outside of the norm or if we were doing a deal involving a unique type of target or state or local law issues, I would call my contacts and ask for referrals. Now, in a matter of minutes, I can figure out the two or three most experienced choices to fit my fact pattern. This type of hard data has made choosing counsel a significantly more scientific process.
  1. Research: Conducting a 50-state survey was an initiation rite of the junior associate that could easily take the better part of a week. I still remember sitting in my firm library surrounded by a tremendous number of books (there used to be a lot more printed versions of those too) and typing page after page of memo after memo. It was even worse for my predecessors who had to rely on Liquid Paper in order to correct their mistakes in long memos rather than on Microsoft Word. Now, chart builders, trackers, heat maps and other tools allow lawyers to generate charts and other deliverables answering a research question in all 50 states in as little as a few minutes. The work product is even better and more compelling than before due to data visualizations that make analytics and trends that much more understandable.
  1. Document Production and Review: This is probably the most obvious of all. You don’t have to be old enough to remember Bates stamps to know just how dramatically document production and review have changed over the last 10 years. A New York Times story meant to assuage fears that artificial intelligence is going to replace lawyers included a statistic that would shock anyone who last practiced a decade ago: only four percent of lawyers’ time is now spent on document review. The fact that such a formerly significant aspect of Biglaw work has been automated and outsourced is the ultimate proof of how quickly the practice of law can change.

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  1. From Service to Strategic: In an always-on era of commoditization and shrinking budgets, it is more important than ever for in-house groups and their advisors to position themselves as strategic partners rather than merely service groups. Data and analytics enable attorneys to create and distribute (often in an automated manner) strategic deliverables ranging from industry, company and competitor analyses (geopolitical risks, large deals, litigation, etc.) to daily or weekly dashboards that provide a holistic view of legal, finance, business and compliance issues impacting their internal and external clients.
  1. Enabling Smaller Firms to Grow: Columns like this tend to focus primarily on large law, but the practice and business of law at small to medium-sized firms is also rapidly changing. Historically, two of the largest obstacles to growth in these firms were the amount of time they had to spend on administrative work, as well as the lack of breadth and depth of expertise that caused them to have to refer out work that they would have preferred to keep in house. Virtual receptionists, CRMs and automated newsletters leave small-law practitioners with more time to practice law, and therefore grow their firms. Practical guidance and form documents that are easily searchable and discoverable in legal workflow platforms have eliminated the need to have file cabinets filled with relevant (and irrelevant) prototypes, and enabled these attorneys to keep more business at their firms rather than referring it out.

These are a few of the many tangible examples of how the practice and business of law continue to change. Technology, data and analytics, globalization and other factors will continue to accelerate change in the legal industry over the coming months and years, and more concrete examples will exist to support the lofty statements about changing the way attorneys practice and succeed in business.

In Major Redesign, Bloomberg Law Streamlines Its Search Interface [LawSites]


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scott-mozarskyScott Mozarsky is President of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg BNA’s Legal Division. In this role, he is accountable for driving growth of Bloomberg BNA’s legal products, including its flagship Bloomberg Law platform. You can reach Scott by email at SMozarsky@bna.com and follow him on Twitter at @smozarsky.

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