LawHawk Blog

Happy New Year everyone! 

Typically the Christmas/New Year period in New Zealand is a time of rest and relaxation after the pre-Christmas rush that occurs every year.  This means it could be easy to miss the large number of interesting articles that surface around this time of the year, recapping on what happened in the previous year and predicting what will happen next year.

It would be a shame to miss these, because there’s still a sense of complacency and lack of knowledge in New Zealand about the amount of change that is coming, and how much time law firms will have to adapt to the change when it arrives.

We’ve captured the most interesting articles we read over the past couple of months and listed them below.  I think it is staggering how much is happening internationally, and have little doubt that 2017 will see a lot more progress than we’ve seen to date. I hope this helps you to see how real these changes are, and factor them into your plans for 2017.

What do you think about this?  Are there any other interesting articles you think should be mentioned?

Document automation is not just for lawyers in firms

While the LawHawk system has been designed to make it easy for law firms to pick up document automation to provide better service to their clients at a low per-use cost, it is also suitable - probably more so - for in-house teams. 

In-house teams don't have an obsolete business model to protect - they simply have more work than they can get through, and a more urgent need to find solutions - for them and the businesses they support.

To work out if document automation could help you, consider these 7 questions:

I recently wrote an ebook on technology, and how it can help lawyers be more successful, after speaking at a conference and finding there was real interest in the topic.  Covering more than 50 different technologies, it has been downloaded many times, but the Law Society was also interested in adapting it into an article for LawTalk, which they have now done.

You can read the LawTalk article here, and it is also set out in full below.  The full ebook (which contains some more detailed information, a number of graphics, and more hyperlinks to the various suppliers) is also still available for download here: http://info.lawhawk.nz/tech-and-disruption-ebook.

My earlier post (Senior associates: 10 ideas for taking more control of your career) struck a chord with a number of people, with the number of shares and comments I received confirming that there definitely is an issue with Senior Associates (and senior in-house lawyers too), and a desire to do something about it. Interestingly, a number of Senior Associates also told me they would have liked to have shared it, but were concerned about how their Partners would have reacted. Food for thought on how those relationships are going... 

While my core message for Senior Associates was to take control of their own lives, they can’t do it alone and depending on where their mind is at, how confident they are, and their history with the firm, they might not make a start by themselves. However, they might if their supervisor or someone else who is looking out for them gives them a nudge and a few tips on where to start.

So I wanted to provide some tips for Partners and Directors of law firms who know a Senior Associate who has more potential than they have been using and who they would like to help kick on. You don’t have to be a direct supervisor – in fact, it might work even better if you are not, or if two or more people are involved as mentors. This framework can also work for less senior team members too, but I think it should work really well for Senior Associates, who have greater ability to take individual action.

I really like the framework outlined below, even more because it's come from someone who really knows his stuff, and is being used in real life at ASB Bank.

As I've written about before, purpose and meaning are big things for me in gaining and maintaining motivation, and it's increasingly important to younger lawyers coming into the profession.

LawTalk recently published an article I wrote on this containing six recommendations for how you and your team can find meaning and satisfaction.  You can read it here, and the full text is also set out below.

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!

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.