Bad Slot Machines... Good Legal Tech... Look, It All Makes Sense.

ILTACON is teaching me that lawyers are, apparently, starting to get it.

The floor of a Las Vegas casino is a bizarre time capsule of bygone pop culture. I just passed a Peter Jackson’s Hobbit slot machine, which amounts to a 7-year-old reference to a movie nobody liked. It shouldn’t be too difficult to reprogram these things, and yet this place is still rocking blinking lights emblazoned by TV shows that jumped the shark years ago. The only reason there isn’t one that LITERALLY jumped the shark is the lawyers got involved.

An apt metaphor for legal tech, a field where luddite attorneys spent years asking engineers to automate traditional tasks rather than build processes that actually work. As a profession, we are absolutely the people who would’ve spent the early 1900s asking Henry Ford if he could make internal combustion horses to hook to their existing buggies.

And while ILTA is a self-selecting group of people who “get it,” when you chat with folks, you can see through the cracks that genuine progress is getting made out there. The language of the pitches over the last few years betray an industry getting used to a more sophisticated audience.

Chatting with nQZebraworks, you think about that broken lawyer model. The company, which is basically bringing the band back together from the old ProLaw days, is putting this into action, building a digital workflow from jump, taking the mail that piled up in a pandemic and pushing it all to digital. That’s not the whole story, obviously, but this is what stuck out to me as someone who spent the early aughts preaching digitization. nQZebraworks would’ve been the answer to my dreams. But this is the kind of thinking that shifts the workflow if not the technology.

It’s different with associates these days because associates want to run the workflows. They grew up doing the work themselves so you’re starting to see that change within the firms. They’re requiring that the tools be at a level where they can make it.

While nQZebraworks is digitizing what America never realized it needed to digitize, Opus 2 is moving boldly into the U.S. market based on what America never realized it needed.

Opus 2 has spent years owning that UK/EU — because we have to separate them now, thanks Brexiteers! — market but are getting a pandemic boost from folks hoping to bring that virtual hearing magic to their own work. Maybe not showing up to court as a cat.

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But as the world returns to normal — not fast enough — courts might try to move back to in-person so judges can act like petty gods. Though firms are starting to wonder if maybe they can get an arbitration panel that can do this nonsense better. Taking a platform forged in the more remote-friendly environs of Europe like Opus 2 just makes sense as a transition to this universe. Look, sometimes you need to go to court to set a precedent. But often you just need the dispute over with.

Not that this is all Opus 2 does. They also have a robust case management offering, taking the role of a project manager without offending partners by actually sticking a project manager on them.

I guess it’s time to wrap up this dispatch from the center of the ILTA convention. We started talking about slot machines and ended up meditating on arbitration platforms. That’s world class legal tech journalism right there.


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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