Partners at large law firms pass through their professional lives like swans gliding on a pond. They project calm above the water while furiously beating their legs below the surface. Keeping clients satisfied is extremely difficult. Clients want to win every case and negotiating point. They demand immediate answers to complex problems, and they always complain about the bill. And swans at other firms are always trying to take them away.
The serenity is for show. Each day a big law parter sends and receives hundreds (or even thousands) of emails, text messages, and phone calls. But the really hard part is managing the daily collision of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Partners at law firms have to chase clients to pay for the work done yesterday. They have to ensure that the work that really needs to be done today gets done. And they must project themselves into the future to find the clients and issues that will fill the desk tomorrow.
A day in the life of a big firm partner does not leave much time to think about the client experience. As a result, the user of experience of working with lawyers at big law firms has not much changed in the thirty years that I have practiced law on both sides of the firm/in-house divide. Lawyers at big firms today rely on basically the same tools with which I was armed when I started at Heller Ehrman in August 1996— email, word processing files, and PDFs. Clients seeking to get an update on the status of a matter still generally fire off an email or use the phone (admittedly now to send a text rather than call).
But this is going to change and sooner than many within the industry think. I had a front row seat to the product led revolution that has played out in the financial services industry over the last two decades. I remember having my mind blown when Keith Rabois handed me the first version of the Square reader at the Grove in September 2010, when around that same time Darragh Buckley then at Stripe showed me a mock up of what a mobile payment experience could look like, and when only slightly later Leonard Speiser let me play with the first version of the Clover terminal.
Those companies capitalized on the cloud and mobile computing wave that took place in the mid-2000s and that incumbent financial institutions, for various reasons, had let pass. They and the other companies borne in what I call the peak FinTech period, the window between the MasterCard IPO in 2006 and the introduction of the Apple Card in 2019, dragged the rest of the financial services industry with them (and generated billions of dollars for the people with the foresight to invest in them).
The same thing is happening today in the legal services industry. AI is the buzziest of tech buzzwords. But large language models have clear application in the legal services industry. Unfortunately for incumbent service providers (i.e., big law) and as was true of the financial services industry through the peak FinTech period, the tech stack that sits within virtually every large law firm is not equipped to take advantage of the new technology. Talented entrepreneurs see the white space, and they are rushing in. They are combining LLMs with web enabled work flows to create delightful user experiences.
Today, Cait and I capped a two-day trip to Munich anchored around the Genesis Summit with a half-day long visit with Lisa Gradow. We needed to clear our heads from our first experience inside a tent at Octoberfest courtesy Maximilian, Andrew, and the rest of the team at Activant. Lisa is a serial entrepreneur (and excellent guide for a midmorning amble through Munich). Her latest venture is Fides. Cait and I recently invested through Three Cats, our personal investment vehicle.
Fides helps manage businesses with complex legal structures. It tracks and manages the board resolutions and filings that local corporate law requires. Over lunch, Lisa gave us a demo of one piece of the tool — a dashboard that enables collaboration between an inhouse legal team and its outside counsel. It was beautiful — an easily scannable web form that shows the status of a given matter, the tasks that need to be completed, the work product necessary to complete it, and a chat box to communicate with outside counsel (with nary an email or an attachment in sight).
Clients will not immediately abandon their existing counsel in favor of those at a law firm that introduces a dashboard for matter management. Incumbency has benefits. The cost of switching lawyers is significant and not worth incurring for marginal improvements in the user of experience. But I know, deeply, that product matters. At some point, marginal improvements add up, and markets flip. If you don’t believe me, ask someone who worked for Motorola after Apple introduced the iPhone or Verifone after Clover and Square debuted their POS systems.
Oh, and if you happen to be a lawyer struggling with governance of a complex legal entity (like an international remittance business or an investment advisor with thousands of associated entities), give Lisa, Vincent, and Philippa a call.
