Wanted: Lawyers who build products
The new fad you can train yourself for.
I had written a short piece earlier complaining that we don’t yet have an Uber for the law. Lets look at the entry barriers a bit more.
Travis Kalanick had ZERO cab driving experience. Bezos had never run a supermarket. These stories have trained our minds to assume that disruption can come from anywhere. Your 200 year old publishing house that knows the business of books, hires the best, rejects good writers summarily, has been upended by a dude with a website. The law has so far been no exception. I will repeat an example from an earlier post:
“.it wasn’t unheard of for an international client to pay your firm by the hour after flying in around the world and braving jet lag for the privilege of having a law book opened in a plush conference room while young associates read out plain language statutes. We are in a world where this no longer happens and Google has changed what counts as value-add in a searchable world.”
“Lateral disruption” of this kind has fuelled more innovation than we like to acknowledge. Billing systems for consulting firms have streamlined law firm financial management. Document management systems made for just about anyone have had fantastic use cases for lawyers. Microsoft Word keeps getting better (though quite not as much as we would like), courts are moving into virtual conference rooms, social media has solved many-an-advertising-conundrum.
Now it appears we are approaching the stage where lateral disruption of this type is providing diminishing returns. There is only so much you can create in wonder around integrating all existing technologies and apps - docusigns, comparison tools, learning aids, billing systems and task management platforms. To move the needle forward, innovation will now have to come from within the legal industry’s minds and processes. Until now, this seemed like a farther away problem to crack because there were so many low-hanging fruit on offer.
Working through the next generation of legal problems and creating more than incremental value at a mass scale will involve moving up the chain of automation and value-add. The cost reductions have to be more than incremental, predictability, accuracy and efficiencies far ahead of what we are able to achieve today. That is where the next big legal/legaltech businesses will like to be.
To do that, a paradigm shift will be required in how products are designed and delivered. The gap in the market and innovation cycle can only be bridged if we have enough legal minds working on applying and developing technology. Why don’t we have enough?
Inertia
Experienced legal minds are in high demand and have built a career path over decades through determined focus on a niche/some niche areas. While venturing into building the products of tomorrow might create wealth, wealth rarely is the sole consideration in calculating opportunity cost. Lawyers live in a world of peers where success is measured not by the value that you create for your customers but your professional standing among colleagues, the bench or your charging rates. While lawyers think this is pretty cool - it is social malaise, the kind that affects dying civilisations on the cusp of being wiped out by those that work harder, smarter and do better.
Bad money
Some of the best young legal talent is either grossly underpaid or grossly overpaid, and no matter where you are - probably doing work more menial than your pay deserves. At the stage of life when you can learn most, you spend your time doing -kinda ok- things like making notes after meetings, drafting and observing, rather than imagining how things can be better for your customers. This leads to mid-career stagnation that reinforces the belief that the only way out - is by sticking it out. Those that do might do well for themselves, but only after a lifetime of doing the same thing and hoping to survive. Not the best way to build a career that innovates switching across, into the new or finding new solutions to old problems. Though things are changing, these are early days.
Skills
The big one - to build products, lawyers must learn how to. Some of the best legal jobs of tomorrow will involve lawyers with niche expertise in both - the law, and product design. The word ‘niche’ here is not used lightly. If you have to make it easier for litigants to file complaints, you need to know what the pain is and should have spent atleast some part of a career trying to solve it.
If not anything, this will aid in bringing a sufficient amount of honesty and modesty to the exercise. Specialised expertise allows you to understand problem statements from having seen many play out in real time. You will stand apart from any person who can code, by your domain expertise. Unlike in other software development projects where you are typically (as a subject matter expert) dispensable at a certain point in the development process - given how legaltech will need to innovate and the focus it will require on customer’s problems based on your legal and practical experience, it is likely your association will be a longer one than say, having a tax advisor sign off on the invoicing system in an e-commerce app.
While there will be many lawyers similarly situated, merely knowing your subject matter will be insufficient if you aren’t able to apply that knowledge in other ways - ways that solve problems in considerably new ways, which work towards developing and designing products that re-imagine the current user experience. It might involve letting go more than the conservative statis that comforts you as a lawyer- but being willing to experiment with ideas based on a sound understanding of what makes products work, and what doesn’t - the hows, the whys, and most importantly - the why nots? The road is hard, but lawyers are great self-teachers, requiring a lifetime of continuous professional education to excel in most legal domains. Incorporating a few new things might enrich the canvass of what you know, even if you fail at turning it into a different career. Up-skilling to ensure lawyers make great product builders, designers, managers - should be a topic of great interest to those that focus on educating the next generation of lawyers. The best jobs of tomorrow will look different, and to do well - we might have to train differently.
That’s my time for today. Some very important requests if you managed to read till here.
First, ask your friends who might be interested in the future of the law - legaltech and innovation, to subscribe. Sign-ups and engagement motivate me to write - I don’t get paid for doing this.
Second, if you have joined us before on our weekly conversations, or find the topic interesting, join us at Clubhouse on the topic of whether your job is about to be replaced by automation at 8 PM IST/1430 GMT, Thursday.
Bring a cigar, join the club.
Until next time.