LawHawk Blog

A recent piece of research shows that senior associates really are an unhappy bunch of lawyers. This recent story showed that 40% of them in the United Kingdom even regret having become a lawyer in the first place. Given that senior associates are the best of those remaining after the REALLY unhappy ones have already moved in-house or left the law entirely, that’s a disturbingly high percentage!

It has also been my own experience that senior associates are the least happy group in a law firm, scoring significantly lower in staff satisfaction surveys.

This post looks at some possible reasons for this and offers some suggestions.

I recent had the opportunity to talk with Tao Lin from Stuff about the changes that are happening in the legal profession, and how they can benefit small businesses here in New Zealand.  She has published a story  "LawHawk spreads wings with online legal templates" which you can view in full here.

It's great to see the continued interest in LawHawk as we continue to spread the word about automated online legal documents in general, and what we are doing at LawHawk in particular.  It's also good to see recognition of the great work that Simmonds Stewart have done in making quality legal documents more available - in New Zealand, and now in Asia.  Andrew Simmonds and his team have led the way in seeing the issue of availability and doing something significant about it.

As Andrew and Katherine Beck both note, the real opportunity is not to replace the relationship between clients and lawyers, but to create opportunities for a better relationship.  More informed clients, working with efficient lawyers who can do work for them a lot more cheaply - and still make a good profit.

You can read the full story below.

I found this recent blog by Robert Ambrogi fascinating: More Exclusive Survey Results: Few Small Firms Implementing New Technology. In it he reviews findings of a new survey of small-solo law firm management in the United Stated conducted by Thomson Reuters Solo and Small Law Firm group, to which he has been given exclusive access. The survey covered firms of 1-29 lawyers, which would be the size of most law firms in New Zealand (85% of which have 5 or fewer lawyers).

The results showed that two-thirds of firms will implement no changes in technology for at least a two-year span. Supporting this, only a quarter of small firms say they will spend more on technology and infrastructure, while 72% say their spend will remain the same, and 4% say they will spend less. More optimistically, this could indicate that it is increasingly becoming possible to access great technology, via the cloud, much more cheaply than used to be the case, but I don’t think that is what they meant!

Document automation (sometimes referred to as document assembly) is a way to create electronic documents using computer systems and workflows, instead of the traditional way of manually working through a document, finding areas to be customised, and typing or deleting relevant details.

At its simplest, document automation can include capture and automatic entry of items like party names and dates. Those who have used it in this way often believe that is all it can be used for.

However, modern document automation technology now allows for far more advanced uses, controlling hundreds or thousands of sections of optional text to create highly customised documents in just a few minutes. In this way it allows users to: 

Do you or your team draft or review confidentiality agreements? For something so simple, there’s actually a lot to think about, including things like:

•     Who are the parties, and who should the parties be?

•     What other people are entitled to access confidential information, and on what basis?

•     What’s in the definition of confidential information?

•     What’s out of the definition of confidential information?

•     What purpose can the confidential information be used for?

•     How should the confidential information be kept secure?

•     What should happen if some confidential information is required to be disclosed?

•     Should confidential information be returned or destroyed, and when should it be allowed to be retained?

We’ve created a free guide to confidentiality agreements, which you can access below. It can help you if you’re drafting your own confidentiality agreement, or as a checklist when reviewing one prepared by someone else.

Feel free to share this with your friends, and let us know what you think – what’s missing? Anything you don’t agree with?

The recent comments by NZLS President Chris Moore in Lawyer numbers soar as the law becomes more complex highlighted some significant trends in New Zealand’s legal profession.

Trend one: “Commercial lawyers are valued by clients for their strategic and tactical business advice, and are spending some portion of their working week providing services that were not strictly speaking legal services.”

This is not only true and increasing, but reflects where commercial lawyers should be putting their long term focus.  As more of the document drafting and other traditional aspects of their jobs are sped up by automation or done by clients themselves or by non-lawyers, commercial lawyers will need - and want - to do other work.  Strategy, negotiation, project management and other business disciplines will be areas where commercial lawyers can add real value.

This is supported by Chapman Tripp’s Managing Partner Andrew Pool’s recent comments to New Zealand Lawyer Magazine:

“When I started my career…we gave legal advice. We told clients what the legal answer was; what the latest case law was; what the legislation says. But all of that stuff can be found online now and increasingly what our clients are coming to us for is our judgement, our expertise, our wisdom, if you like, and they want a law firm that really understands their business; really understand their sector, or industry, and really delivers service as well as quality advice, and those are quite radical changes and ongoing significant challenges for all of us.”

The great thing is that these new areas are far more interesting than document drafting, and largely occur in front of and with the client.  It will be much easier to build relationships, demonstrate the value being added, and differentiate from competitors.

You only have to look at the shifts accountants have made following the introduction of Xero to see what a positive change this can be for those who are prepared to make the significant investments to do these things well. 

Richard Susskind in “ Tomorrow’s Lawyers” emphasises the need for real investment in these new disciplines, and notes that what he terms the “legal hybrids” of the future will have to undertake comprehensive and rigorous training.  As a result, they will be “formidably schooled and unarguably expert in their related disciplines and, in turn, will be able to add considerable value to the legal services they offer to clients.”

Hopefully the days of lawyers opening negotiation meetings by saying “Shall we just turn the pages” will soon be a thing of the past!

Trend two: “There may also be an argument that as the number of laws continued to grow, so the number of lawyers needed also continued to grow”

There doesn’t appear to be any sign of the amount of law and regulation decreasing anytime soon, while the penalties for non-compliance with many laws have increased substantially and really focussed the minds of business leaders (the soon to be enacted Health and Safety at Work Act being the latest example).  However, whether it’s more lawyers we need, or more effective use of time by existing lawyers, is more debatable.  Lawyers certainly can, and will, become more efficient and focussed.

Given that half the profession are sole practitioners, and that 85% of all law firms have five or fewer lawyers, staying on top of all those law changes and ensuring they are reflected in precedents and other knowledge management resources could be a real challenge.  Fortunately, in addition to the substantial resources which are available from the traditional legal publishers like LexisNexis, ADLS, Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer, there’s a rapidly emerging number of ancillary support organisations such as ConnectWorks (who provide Trustworks and Companyworks) and LawHawk who can support lawyers in these areas.  With cloud technology, collaboration and sharing of knowledge and resources is only getting easier.

Trend three: “There had been a rise in the number of specialist lawyers as a result.”

This trend will only continue.  With the substantial rise in in-house legal teams, the pressure has been on law firms for some time now to become more specialised.  Many in-house lawyers have come from firms and are very good lawyers with a diverse range of skills.  With limited budgets for external work, when they go external it is often because they are seeking specific expertise.

At the other end of the market, with new non-lawyer providers offering wills and contract reviews cheaper than many law firms, members of the public will increasingly be able to do or source more basic legal work themselves. Lawyers will need to be able to demonstrate that they have expertise which cannot be obtained elsewhere and that they can add specialist value.  

Trend four: “Moore praised the small town "generalist" expected by their clients to help them with all their legal needs. The rising complexity of law meant they had to be talented individuals, he said.”

When viewed against the trends outlined above, it is particularly challenging for the small town “generalist” to cover all of a client’s legal needs, and it’s actually not required.  With greater connectivity and collaboration facilitated by technology, it is easier for more generalist lawyers to locate specialists (who aren’t a threat to the wider relationship because of their specialisation) and outsource key components of the job (effectively unbundling and project managing it, while still retaining overall responsibility for the client relationship and delivering an outcome that the client needs).  An example of this trend is specialist employment barrister, Mark Donovan, who blogs regularly on employment law issues and is using technology to make it easy for people to engage him, wherever they are. Interwoven is another good example of specialist firms working together to serve clients better.

Public Trust’s offering of “ Executor Assist” to law firms to work with them to manage estates demonstrates the shift in mindset that is occurring.  As Public Trust note, they are aiming to move from “arch enemy” to ally.

A collaborative approach, as required, may in many cases be better than trying to maintain an in-house capability, just in case.

In addition, a range of technology tools – many cloud based - do enable the generalist lawyers to do a broader range of work faster and better – with more time to research and check to ensure that the end product is as good as it needs to be.

Whether it’s accessing technology tools, or forming networks and alliances with other professionals, collaboration is much easier for the small firms, and lack of size is no longer the disadvantage it once may have been.

 

When I first read this article in HBR, Why Your Innovation Team Needs a Lawyer, I liked it. All lawyers have probably experienced at least once the dismay of being brought in at the tail end of a new initiative, when all the key decisions have already been made and the deadline for sign-off is…5pm today. Nobody wants you to ask any questions, they don’t want to (and probably can’t) make any changes, and they’re scared that you will “kill the project – or reduce it to a shadow of its potential”. All they really want is a sign-off.

So an article identifying that the real problem is often that “not a single legal representative had been involved in these new business initiatives from the beginning” is a good thing. As the article says

This is where the opportunity lies – in collaboration that includes the final approvers, embedding the legal teams in the design and innovation process.

The problem is that the more I reflect on it, this article – and many people’s views of lawyers in general – is based on a view that the lawyers need to be on the team so they can understand it – if you explain it in simple terms - and not kill it, but there is no suggestion that the lawyers might themselves have the creativity to actually add to and enhance the underlying initiative.

 

In my earlier blog on how to attract and retain staff, I noted that there are 5 key factors that I tried to focus on to make work more satisfying for myself and my team, and which will help with attracting and retaining staff. One of these is variety of work.

This is a difficult one to manage, as there is an inherent tension between variety (which most people enjoy) and increasing demands from clients for genuine specialisation and expertise. I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago in Are you straddling in your legal practice? You have to get the balance right, and it will vary from person to person.  Here's my thoughts on how you can do this. 

Great to chat with Giles Beckford of Radio New Zealand's Business News  recently about the opportunities legal document automation creates for New Zealand's predominantly smaller legal practices.

You can listen to the interview here:

A transcript of the interview is set out below: