Technology

Solving The Biggest Weakness In Biglaw: Intapp Outlines Its Vision

The legal industry is behind, but it doesn't have to be.

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Gathering in the crowded Grand Central Hyatt ballroom, over 575 registrants representing over 250 firms and legal departments, hushed to take in the opening speakers at Intapp’s Connect19 show. What we didn’t really expect was Coldplay to blast over the speakers to introduce COO Dan Coleman — or that all the other speakers would also have their own walk-up music befitting an at bat appearance or a WWE intro. I kept hoping that a speaker would be called up a second time so I could hear “Viva La Vida” and yell out “BY GOD, THAT’S COLEMAN’S MUSIC!!!”

But of all the pop walk-up music employed by the staff running the Intapp Connect19 show, they never played the one theme that would best define the spirit of this conference. I’m talking, of course, about Vanilla Ice’s seminal 1990 work, “Ice Ice Baby.” It’s hard to imagine there are any lyrics in the popular musical canon that could better explain Intapp’s core business mission to the legal world than:

“Stop, collaborate, and listen.”

Collaboration is at the heart of Intapp’s mission to bring efficiency to the law with an industry cloud for professional and financial services. Collaboration across practices and collaboration across functions to ensure that client demands are being served, especially in a world where clients are trying to cut back on firms and pushing back on unpredictable billable hour fee arrangements. That’s a taller order than the soundbyte may seem, but Intapp sees an opportunity with its platform to span the entire client life cycle to identify opportunities for beneficial collaboration.

Intapp CEO John Hall explained that “one of the big points we want to make is that it’s about what you might be able to do today.” In other words, Hall pushes back against the law firm futurist model that gets tripped up imagining the firm of the future without recognizing that there are best practices that can be implemented today to wildly improve the law firm model.

And it’s a model in need of attention. Some 49 percent of survey respondents thought that a lack of collaboration was their firm’s biggest weakness. With around 53 percent of clients reporting that they have cut at least one of their firms over the past year and 76 percent claiming to be in cost-cutting mode and 82 percent utilizing alternative fee arrangements in some part of the legal spend, the pressure is on firms to constantly re-earn client business.

How does a firm effectively price out an alternative fee arrangement? Eyeballing it is the current preferred method and like a lot of Biglaw practices, not a particularly savvy strategy. But a system that monitored the life cycle of every matter across every part of the firm that it touches? That’s where efficiencies can arise. In a session later in the day, HBR Consulting Senior Director Andrew Baker and American Lawyer’s Roy Strom ran through the potential of a platform like Intapp’s that can use zero-entry capture of data throughout the law firm work process and run it through a model for serving a particular matter not unlike Uber, where it can guess at fee and even potentially figure out the best lawyer. Complain about surge pricing all you want, but it’s economically efficient.

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From Intapp’s perspective, this is what’s been lacking in the service industry writ large, and the legal industry in particular. For large firms, the choice for years has been between “square peg round hole-ing” a comprehensive solution designed for manufacturing companies that fail to grasp service industry quirks or to purchase more and more solutions for support silos (IT, Knowledge, Risk & Compliance, etc.) that drive those functions further apart and put up more roadblocks to collaboration.

In the final session of the day, former Orrick chair and current Intapp board member Ralph Baxter kicked off the festivities by explaining that it’s not just that clients are restless in the delivery of legal services, but that they understand how it can be done better. Unlike law firms, the global corporate world has embraced — with the help of software providers serving their needs more consistently over the years — a collaborative model. They don’t see what the holdup is with all these crazy lawyers.

As legal technology guru Richard Susskind explained in the final presentation of the day, the Big 4 are the competition of the future in this space and they have spent years embracing technology. As lawyers struggle to catch up, the warning is to resist the Steampunk mentality — the bankruptcy of imagination that envisions horseless carriages as stagecoaches with robot horses. The future isn’t about “robot lawyers” it’s about technological solutions that eliminate the need for lawyer work in the first place.

Susskind is fond of an old Black & Decker management game. Upon showing a newly minted executive a picture of a drill they’d ask if this is what the company sells. The noob would inevitably agree and then get shown a hole. Black & Decker sells holes to clients who need to have holes in specific locations — the drill is just the best current solution they offer. The lesson is to begin from the solution and work backward rather than waste valuable time wondering if a computer can ever do the specific task a third-year associate is performing right now.

But to circle back to John Hall’s comments, the first step to that future is to recognize that there are key improvements to be made today. At Connect19, Intapp laid out its case for providing firms a path to do just that.

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Word to your mother.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior 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. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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