As someone who came from the litigation side of the house, I’ve watched the evolution of legal technology through a litigation-centric lens. EDiscovery tools seem intuitive to me because they streamline tasks that I’ve performed. They save clients time and money that I used to bill them. There was a need and vendors have rushed to fill it.
But the transactional side has its share tasks that need streamlining too. That’s where products like M&A Clause Analytics come in, helping lawyers draft agreements by marshaling guidance from thousands of documents and expert input to provide lawyers with guidance on drafting complex documents that reflect market standards.
There’s a temptation to view legal technology — on both sides of the professional house — as a series of discrete products designed to fill discrete needs. An a la carte menu of software solutions that lawyers can “plug and play.” That’s certainly one way of looking at the space.
An alternative view is that the clients and firms don’t really face small obstacles that need a specific technological fix — or even a technology-based solution at all — but a bundle of individual tasks that add up to an overarching theme: improving workflow for both the lawyer and the client. That’s the golden ticket issue in law right now, and that’s how providers should approach the legal market.
I recently spoke with Susan Chazin, Portfolio Director for Securities and Banking at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S., about what Wolters Kluwer is up to and this new horizon of providing solutions with an eye on improving workflow generally.
For the unfamiliar, Wolters Kluwer Law and Regulatory U.S. provides an array of research and advising resources to both law firms and corporate counsel to provide critical decision-making insights in a variety of areas from securities and banking to antitrust to health. Chazin told me that the company is focusing resources on providing workflow tools and solutions and that the pressure to improve workflow is coming from both sides of the client relationship. It makes sense for clients to want solutions that streamline work and, by extension, drive down the bills. Indeed, if something can render workflow sufficiently efficient, clients can move the work in-house and avoid outside counsel altogether.
Yet Chazin says firms are just as hungry for solid workflow solutions. With clients balking at paying full price for first-year work and demanding that some transactions move to alternative fee arrangements, firms need to get from point A to point P (for associate and partner) as quickly and cost effectively as possible or risk sinking a lot of hours that they can’t recoup. After all, not everything is moving in-house. For example, M&A is such complex work that only serial acquirers can afford to bring that kind of expertise in-house. Chazin notes that there will always be a need for firms to handle these bespoke client needs. But that doesn’t mean clients are going to pay full price and that puts pressure on the firms.
Not to mention the fact that clients aren’t as loyal as they once were and lawyers need every advantage they can get to go back out into the market to pitch for work.
The Transactional Law Suite is the jewel of Wolter Kluwer’s workflow efforts in this area. The suite provides users with four solutions: RBsource, an SEC research tool that aides the user in drafting complete and accurate filings; RBsourceFilings, which allows the user to contextually link research into filings; Clarion, Wolters Kluwer’s due diligence tool; and, of course, M&A Clause Analytics. A recent update, RegReview, adding more functionality to RBsource and RBsourceFilings too.
A commitment to workflow over simple technology is core to the Wolters Kluwer approach. “Technology can only get you so far. Technology is never going to replace attorneys, it’s just another tool to make them work faster and smarter,” Chazin said. Wolters Kluwer leans on its experts, attorneys with significant experience in the area, to ensure the product provides the best guidance possible.
One group sure to get a lot of use out of these products are young attorneys. These are the lawyers most likely to perform these tasks and the ones most likely to need guidance to get it right. “Like anything with law, it’s not so much what’s there, it’s what’s missing,” Chazin said of the critical skill of effective drafting. With senior attorneys unwilling or unable to expend a lot of time training their juniors, tools that can assist them in both getting the right answer and learning the ropes are of the essence.
The legal profession is changing and how lawyers conceptualize the scope of that change is just as important to diagnosing the solutions a practice needs. Does a firm or client need discrete solutions to discrete tasks or a broad workflow solution to manage a number of related tasks? Wolters Kluwer sees the future in the latter.
Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.