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Climactic Changes In Law Mean New Opportunities For Librarians, Futurist Urges

In this new legal market, knowledge really is power, and law librarians are uniquely situated to help their law firms tap into this power source.

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Climactic changes in the business and practice of law mean new opportunities for law librarians to refine and distribute the knowledge that will be essential to law firms’ success.

That was the message legal analyst and futurist Jordan Furlong delivered Saturday morning in Washington, D.C., in his keynote address at the 10th annual PLLIP Summit, a meeting of private law librarians and information professionals that is the de facto kick-off of the annual conference of the American Association of Law Libraries.

In Furlong’s speech, “New Horizons, How Law Librarians and Legal Information Professionals Can Redefine Law Firms in the 21st Century,” he described a legal world that is undergoing climate change at a fundamental level.

This change is being driven, he said, by three key forces:

  • Major shifts in legal spending by corporate clients, with them pushing firms harder on price and taking more work in-house.
  • Massive increases in legal technology capacity and accessibility, changing from hours to minutes the time it takes to complete much of legal work.
  • Regulatory changes that are accelerating the rise of alternative legal services providers, particularly with regard to private investment in legal services.

“It’s a brand new world,” Furlong said. “And it’s a world that law firms just weren’t built for.”

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As a result of these forces, legal work is being dispersed into two broad categories, Furlong said. There is complex legal work — that which is customized, intricate, and of high value — and there is commodity work — that which is straightforward, repeatable, and low-impact.

That commodity work “is sailing slowly but surely out of law firms,” Furlong said. It is migrating to new platforms and new providers, such as ALSPs, the Big Four accounting firms, and Biglaw spinoffs.

For law firms, that means they must adapt to what remains, which is the complex work. As they make that adaptation, they will increasingly need and rely on new resources, including a broader range of allied professionals and new business structures for delivering their services.

But the most critical resource, Furlong said, will be advisory knowledge.

“Law firms will still need great lawyers with leading-edge skills,” he said. “But they’ll also need embedded knowledge beyond any one lawyer’s individual capacity.”

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As firms focus on this more complex work, three types of knowledge will be important to them:

  • Deep client intelligence, to help firms develop competitive intelligence and also to help them better understand their own clients and where the firm should focus its efforts.
  • Legal data and analytics. The emergence of data and analytics provides firms with tools they never had before. By 2030, he predicted, there will be categories of knowledge and information that we would not even imagine possible today.
  • Embedded firm expertise. Not just knowledge management, but experience management. It’s not just the memo, find the person in the firm who wrote the memo. If you can leverage all that big brain and turn it into systems that can be deployed, you have a competitive advantage for the firm.

The Legal Knowledge Supply Chain

The need for this knowledge within firms will give rise to what Furlong described as the legal knowledge supply chain — the variety of personnel within a firm who help create that advisory knowledge. He divides these personnel into two functions:

  • Data miners, including IT, operations, finance, practice groups, and business development.
  • Data refiners, made up of law librarians and information professionals.

“Data doesn’t make decisions,” Furlong said. “It has to be pulled out and refined and turned into something that becomes actionable insight that lawyers can deploy for their clients.”

Herein is the law library’s opportunity, Furlong told the audience of roughly 250. It is to play a central role in building collaborative legal knowledge supply chains within their firms, and to position the law library as the refinery and distributor of advisory knowledge.

“With deep knowledge of clients and data, the law library can become a capital asset,” he said. “And law firms have very few capital assets.”

In this new legal market, knowledge really is power, Furlong said, and law librarians are uniquely situated to help their law firms tap into this power source. “This is your bailiwick, this is your world, where you live.”

Consider not just what should law librarians do, but what could they do, he urged the group.

“What should the knowledge function be in law firms as we move towards 2030?” he closed. “It’s an amazing opportunity.”

Robert Ambrogi Bob AmbrogiRobert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

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