ABATECHSHOW Day 1: Susskind wows the crowd … again

Keynote speaker Richard Susskind “wowed the crowd” and he was usual best.  We saw him last year in London shortly after his book The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services was published and he continues to give a grand performance.  And his humor is as crisp as ever.

He kept to the main points of his book:

1.  Deep and rapid technological advances (of the disruptive kind) leading to major threats to various aspects of the traditional law firm business model

2.  Relentless connectivity, and the burgeoning electronic legal marketplace

3.  The “decomposition of legal tasks” into component parts that can be delegated to various sources: in-sourcing, relocating, offshoring, outsourcing, subcontracting

Susskind started with the classic Einstein & chauffeur story and stated that the themes of his presentation will be: future, market, commoditization, technology, shape and lawyers.  He prefaced his themes by stating that the hunker down strategy that is currently employed by law firms is fundamentally flawed because in 18 months it will not be business as usual due to the fact that current economic and/or market factors have permanently change the legal terrain.  Thanks to other forces, there has been an acceleration of efficiency effect that will change how our services are delivered and what a client truly finds necessary.  To help illustrate his “what customers want” point, Susskind used Black & Decker as an example (a power drill versus the hole in the wall).  The fundamental need that clients have is for our knowledge and how to turn that into value.  Firms have been profitable because of their position as a reactive tool in the marketplace even though clients are truly seeking proactive ways of dispute avoidance and risk management.  To help drive his point of that there is disconnect between a firm and a client, Susskind used an illustration of a cliff with a fence at the top and an ambulance at the bottom.   Basically, firms have been comfortable in improving the ambulance when clients have always wanted a stronger fence.  One of the ways to begin to remedy this issue is the “allowance of the impossible,” meaning a marriage of automation and innovation in the legal marketplace.

Susskind stated that there is currently a three part dilemma in the marketplace: reduce internal headcount, reduce external spend and clients want more for less.  On a side note, Susskind mentioned that there appears to be a new movement of external investment or management heading towards firms in the form of private equity and venture capitalists wanting some degree of partnership. What is fueling the dilemma is a client’s raw strategy (cutting costs and multi-sourcing to complete the task at hand) and community sharing (via a hybrid of social networking, collaborating with an online community, so to speak, to share costs and harness the power of relevant departments such as IT).  If a firm is to survive, they have to stop using a hunker down strategy and adopt a form of commoditization.

In the past, lawyers customized, or bespoke, a pleading to a particular matter or need.  Today, firms still claim that everything is customized to a particular client and fight any form of commoditization because there is no money to be made.  Susskind stated that this train of thought is incorrect and through standardization as well as various packaging of the “knowledge,” the marketplace will evolve and be in a better position to address any issue (i.e. tax law).  Overall, client work being bespoke is a romantic concept not reality and the reality is that legal work is nothing more than a bundle of twigs that can be decomposed or separated into various tasks and/or elements that can be allocated across a broad spectrum of entities (basic project management).  The client’s mentality is that changes need to be predictable, cost must be decreased and quality must be increased (via the distillation and synthesis of experts) into one simple model or package that can be recycled amongst an online community with mass collaboration.

Drawing from Ray Kurzweil’s works, as technology improves, it causes changes in any given subject matter becoming the heart of everything. Utilizing the differences between the manual and computer version of Solitaire, Susskind stated that law will be embedded into a client’s system (i.e. regulatory compliance work) and the only thing that will be left for a lawyer or firm to contribute is strategy and/or tactics.  At the rate technology is growing, this contribution will be the only component, bespoke or otherwise, a firm will be able to provide unless they take steps to build a better fence at the top of the cliff.

And he had a wealth of great quotes (“”Innovation is when you use technology to do things that were previously not possible”).  We also saw attendees Twittering like crazy and there is a wealth of comment on blogs already.  Some samples blogs and Tweets:

@Afifonlaw: Richard Susskind’s Keynote Address at ABA TECHSHOW 2009 http://tinyurl.com/cq3y4j

@jimcalloway: Richard Susskind’s Keynote Address at ABA #TECHSHOW 2009 was great! More comments on my blog http://tinyurl.com/c988bh

@johnsirman: Over the next 10 years there will be an incremental revolution (complete change) in the way legal services are delivered

@edscanlan“Innovation is when you use technology to do things that were previously not possible”

@johnsirman: Enjoyed the Susskind keynote: The “end of lawyers” is not near, there are new opps for those who innovate and work differently

@nikiblack Susskind: Suggests social network of solos could innovate and take over many areas law firms now handle

@GabeAcevedo  Susskind: the phenomenon of social networking will become what email is to lawyers now.  

And our favorite:

@StephKimbro   Thinking that the attorneys that really need to hear the ideas in Susskind’s speech are not the ones attending

      Note:  Stephanie Kimbro was awarded the Jim Keane Award for excellence in e-lawyering.  She is an attorney and owner of Kimbro Legal Services, a Virtual Law Practice in N.C.

We also covered a number of seminars, three of which were:

Security: Hardening Data in an Age of Cyber Warfare

Speakers focused on how to protect a company’s data as well as client’s information as referenced in the program guide, i.e. use of iron key usb drives.  The two main points were: one should not be asking about how to protect the system but what needs to be done from a minor and/or major failure standpoint; and, audits of external and internal activities should be done on a regular basis.   For the presentation click here.

Searching and Analysis: Are Keywords Really the Key?

The two initial problems facing the trial bar is “over promising” (i.e. discovery can be completed in a month) and “over terrifying” (i.e. the document review portion of case is going to cost $500 million dollars) the court.  This is why courts are looking to and may begin imposing substantive requirements during the meet and confer process.  There has to be a “scaling of the case” to determine what the case truly is about and how much it is actually worth, i.e. the case is worth $60,000 but the discovery cost will be $250,000.  Moreover, simply presenting a 1,000 standard and recycled search term list that generates terabytes of documents will no longer be acceptable.    

To find the true “trial” documents, the speakers mentioned that a universal method or process (i.e. TREC + Expert + Computer system) needs to be developed and properly documented throughout the course of the case in order to eliminate the false positives and/or noise generated by the basic Boolean search.  Both agreed that having a computer on autopilot may be an effective way of removing a custodian’s junk system files but a team of humans with collective as well as alternative search parameters are the way to go.  Unfortunately, the speakers did not go into greater detail.   For the presentation click here.

Review: Techniques and Technologies to Keep Costs Low

This was a presentation by Craig Ball, an attorney with a visibility and prominence in the e-discovery space.  He discussed that anecdotal evidence suggests that approximately 70% of the costs associated with e-discovery lie in attorney review.  His focus was on methods to keeping costs in line with the value of the case to the client, and discussed the effective use of contract attorneys.  We’ll expound on these themes in a later post.

Privileged & Confidential: The Private Parts of E-Discovery

The speaker provided a limited technical analysis of privacy as it applies to the Fourth amendment and how cases help shaped the law and subsequent claims of relief.   Unfortunately she did not discuss the differences between domestic and international privacy issues nor the respective effects on cases today.  This is an important area today especially for contract attorneys doing cross-border project work in the U.S., and project work in Europe.

 We also made the rounds with vendors and will add that in our Day 2 post.