Technology

alt.legal: To Strive, To Seek, To Find And Not To Yield

If the end of 2015 has you contemplating a jump away from law, consider the world of alternative legal services.

By Ed Sohn on December 30, 2015 3:59 pm

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life!

– Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

If you are reading this post this eve of New Year’s Eve, you might be an associate hungry for more (or better) bonus news, or you are stuck in the office trying to muster up a few dozen more hours, in hopes of hitting your requirements. Good luck, and may the Force be with you.

But before you keep slogging away, stop billing just for a minute, brew a cup of tea or coffee. Or pop the bottle of $20 Merlot that vendor sent you for the holidays, or pull out the flask of Bulleit Rye you hide in your bottom drawer. And as you enjoy your beverage, go ahead and give this old verse a read. Let your eyes scan the composed lines of a sailor’s discontented musings and his yearning to do something more, something greater.

While perhaps a tad romantic, for our final post of 2015, I want to reinforce that through alt.legal, my colleague Joe Borstein and I we have continually sought to present to you a vision of yourself investing your efforts and intelligence in a different way. As the poet declared, “Tis not too late to seek a newer world!” Ever since our first post, we have ever sought “to re-inspire you, and to remind you that the apparent options are not the only options. There are alternatives.”

That’s what it comes down to, for us. At bottom, our core truth is that we really believe in this alternative legal services world, and we want you to join us and the many others that have made the big leap. We have committed ourselves to this world, we love to write about it here and elsewhere, and we do our best to channel our professional and non-professional efforts to advancing that conversation.

For example, three weeks ago, Joe was running around at breakneck speed as the key organizer of the highly successful Legal Startup Pitch Night, hosted by the Penn Law Alumni association, all out of his personal interest to foster the community. Joe’s investment of sheer effort into that alt.legal event happened to be the week before another activity out of his personal interest, something I was privileged to witness: his wedding.

We’re not trying to beat our chest here. What really drives us to evangelize this message, work in this industry, and connect with bold entrepreneurs is our singular belief that all of this holds real game-changing potential for legal practice. And because we’re both Biglaw alums, we have deeply personal convictions about the value talented attorneys can bring to alternative services providers and legal technology companies.

Exhibit A: the recent 2016 Citi survey affirms this shift to lower-cost alternative legal providers.

Law departments will look for the most efficient provider of services, based on value. While this is not a new concept, the current demand/supply equation has given them the buying power to better realize their goal of getting greater value for their legal spend. More will be sent to lower-cost service providers. While the focus to date of these efforts has been on relatively routine commodity work, we expect that over time, lower-cost service providers will find ways to broaden the scope of work they can handle.

And regarding technology:

Certainly, technology developments will enable more work to be done at a lower cost by a range of service providers. Although improvements in technology in general might appear to threaten law firm business, they also present opportunities to improve efficiency…

For our Exhibit B, a look at what we’ve written about in 2015 adds some color to this exciting story, as well.

These people doing these incredible ventures, they are your peers. And what’s really incredible is not that they are that special or different. Most of them once sat in the glassy offices, poring over complex agreements or scorching the earth to find the right cite or killer document for your motion.

My favorite quote from an alt.legal piece this year, from Adam Cohen of the Covenant Review, sums it up:

[M]ost people who have good ideas never put in all the effort to make them happen. If you put in all the effort, you already have a good chance of making it happen. I’ve had a lot of older lawyers who said they had this same idea.

But they never did it. That’s the difference.

The difference is simply that the doers are the ones that did it.

Look, if you are happy being an attorney, that’s great. I’m genuinely with you, and there’s a part of me that is haunted by a return to legal practice. Our message for you is that there are finally some new and exciting tools to help you serve your clients, so let us equip you with the technology and partners to actually transform your practice.

But if this end of 2015 has you contemplating a jump away from law, if these articles have resonated with you in any way, then maybe 2016 is the year where you depart the category of people who didn’t act. Maybe 2016 is when you the join the ranks of people who have taken the plunge, the doers.

Strong in will; to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Happy New Year, everyone. I can’t wait to see what next year brings.

Ed Sohn is a Global Director at Thomson Reuters’ award-winning legal outsourcing company, Pangea3, which employs approximately 1,000 full-time attorneys globally. After five and a half years as a Biglaw litigation associate, Ed spent over two years in New Delhi, India, managing hundreds of Indian attorneys and professionals in delivering high-value managed legal services. He now focuses on developing integrated technology and outsourced legal solutions. You can contact Ed about e-discovery, managed legal services, theology, chess, Star Trek The Next Generation, or the Chicago Bulls at [email protected].