Tech will only get us so far; you must first solve a ‘broken system,’ says legal forecaster Jordan Furlong
Law21’s Jordan Furlong has some advice for Global Legal Hackathon participants — and everyone else who wants to make law more accessible and efficient
Many entrenched in the legal innovation sector sometimes find themselves fighting an uphill battle. Indeed, how do you hack an industry to make it more efficient, and more accessible, when its business models discourage these very outcomes? Fortunately for us, legal market analyst Jordan Furlong has some advice for legal hackers, and it starts with asking the right questions.
In his latest book, Law Is A Buyer’s Market: Building A Client-First Law Firm, legal forecaster and former lawyer Jordan Furlong makes the case that lawyers and law firms, now faced with steep competition and decreased demand for their services, must change their approach and their understanding of themselves if they have any chance of defeating this existential threat.
But while innovation and technology may seem like the answers to solving the problems of exclusionary costs and “friction-heavy” business processes, it’s a bit of a catch-22. As Furlong explains in an interview with the Global Legal Hackathon blog, “technology alone is only going to get us so far.” To get efficiency and access, you have to fix the system itself.
Despite the Sisyphean nature of solving an entire system’s worth of problems, Furlong is emphatic that “the time is now for a legal hackathon.” He cautions, though, “before you write a line of code,” you must first take in the bigger picture.
In our conversation below, Furlong diagnoses the state of legal innovation in context and carves a path forward — not just for legal hackers but for anyone interested in “trying to fix this broken system.”
Law21’s Jordan Furlong will be at the Global Legal Hackathon event in Ottawa, locally hosted by vLex/vLex Canada and Invest Ottawa, on February 23, 2018.
Do you think the majority of the legal industry is actively resisting innovation?
I would say the majority of the industry is passively resisting innovation. Ask 100 lawyers what they think of innovation, and they’ll all say it’s great. Innovation is just fine — up until it interferes with the way you’ve been doing things.
People fear the unknown viscerally. They cling to what they know, especially in times like this where there’s so much uncertainty and so much apprehension. And so suggesting that we’re going to do things differently is very hard on people, especially when they don’t know how. And that is what’s behind this resistance — it’s passive resistance, it’s reflexive resistance.
In a recent blog post, you wrote that “the great gift (and curse) of technology in the 21st century is how quickly it renders the magical commonplace.” How can firms and lawyers be prepared for this kind of change or should everyone just, as you’ve said, “get over it”?
The openness of the legal profession and community to technological solutions is probably as wide now as it’s ever been. However, I don’t think it’s as large as it’s going to be. I still think there’s significant room for us to maneuver — and to expand. There’s still a significant amount of resistance by lawyers: A) because lawyers resist change by nature, and b) because specifically in the area of tech, if they don’t understand it and they can’t get their heads around it, then they’re often automatically opposed to it. As that resistance starts to give way, the opportunity will open wider.
But the other issue is that technology alone is only going to get us so far. The answer to the legal access problems that we have right now are not entirely or even substantially technological. They’re systemic.
The systems that we’ve got worked fine 50 or 60 years ago, but they’re not working now. So before you start programming — before you write a line of code — you need to think about the users who are involved. Where are the breakdowns in the system, where are the problems? How can we approach [solutions] from that angle?
“The answer to the legal access problems that we have right now are not entirely or even substantially technological. They’re systemic.” — Jordan Furlong, Law21
What are some of these systemic problems?
In some ways, the systemic problems are far more recalcitrant. It isn’t just the good will of lawyers [that will solve the current issues] but that of multiple stakeholders — governments, the courts, a number of non-profit associations and organizations — that have a vested interest in maintaining the systems we have now. It’s not so much that they want to defend them — pretty much everybody recognizes it’s not working that well — but it’s very hard to disengage yourself from systems that you have grown up with and that you consider to be part of the normal, natural order of things.
The way that the legal profession has generally gone about selling its services contributes its own set of problems. For instance, lawyers often bill clients for the numbers of hours they work — but from the point of view of the customer or the client, that’s unreliable, it’s unpredictable, and you know what, people only have so much money to spend. If you can’t tell people how much a service is going to cost them, they’re far less likely to use that service. Lawyers don’t necessarily appreciate the barriers to people’s successful use of the legal system that their own billing systems create.
I think the real problem, though, is that legal dispute processing and settlement is an expert system designed to be used by experts, not by everyday people. That’s neither good nor bad; it’s just the way it was built. But now the system is being used by people who aren’t experts, and it’s not working, and this should be no surprise to us.
So if you’re trying to improve the legal system from an outside perspective, imagine that there are no lawyers at all — and no law firms — and then ask, how would you go about solving the problem? Because that way, you stop thinking about how you get lawyers to change , since that’s not really the point of the exercise. The point is to start thinking about how we can get closer to a workable legal system than we were the day before. Focus less on the enablers of the system, and more on the users of the system and ultimately, on the system itself.
“Imagine that there are no lawyers at all — and no law firms — and then ask, how would you go about solving the problem?”
What solutions have you seen that address these systemic issues well?
There are certainly promising companies out there, but t for the most part, they’re pretty small scale. To the extent that you have major success stories in access to justice, [there are companies] like LegalZoom, which creates pretty straightforward yet reliable documents like an incorporation for a business or maybe a basic divorce declaration. But it’s not a complete solution all on its own. LegalZoom can give you the basic document and put you in touch with a lawyer who can help you review and improve for a reduced rate, but at the end of the process, you’re right back into the same legal system.
“I don’t want to make the problem seem bigger than it is, but the one thing I want to warn people against is this idea that we can program our way out of this mess.”
Anyway, you asked me what works. LegalZoom is a great success story, and there’s a US company called WeVorce, which is basically meant for couples who want to get divorced but who don’t want to destroy each other’s lives in the process. It’s an online system, and what’s great about it is that it isn’t just about law. They go beyond lawyers and connect users with other services like financial advisors, child psychologists, and parenting experts. Because getting divorced isn’t just a legal issue — there are so many other aspects of ending a marriage, and WeVorce tries to provide a whole solution to that.
In terms of transformative approaches, I tend to think that WeVorce shows us the way forward a little more than LegalZoom, which basically says we’re just doing this traditional part of this process faster, easier, and cheaper. But Wevorce says, we can rethink the whole process. Because hardly anything is just a legal issue, right?
This is all big-picture, 30,000-foot stuff, I know. It won’t necessarily have any impact on what people do at this event. But even planting some of these ideas with hackathon participants might help them kind of pull the camera back, see the bigger picture, and recognize that what we need more than a technology solution is a systemic solution.
Do you think hackathons like this one help traditional firms or GCs do more with less, as you say?
Yeah, absolutely, but you need several ingredients for that to work. Number one, you need someone who actually wants to do more with less, and that takes out 90% of your law firms right there, because they’re not set up to “do less” under the billable-hour system.
When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re a lawyer, everything looks like a legal issue and a lawyer issue; lawyers usually think lawyers are the best solution to everything. One of the great things about having people come from outside the legal profession in a hackathon is that they say, “Maybe there’s a solution that doesn’t necessarily involve a lawyer.” It’s really hard to get lawyers and law firms to think that way.
“One of the great things about having people come from outside the legal profession in a hackathon is that they say, “Maybe there’s a solution that doesn’t necessarily involve a lawyer.”
So, where do we start?
I guess for me, the real bottom line is, how close you can get to the end user? What is the outcome you’re trying to generate here, and for whom? It’s the proper way of asking a question about any new innovation or idea: What problem does this solve? Who does it solve it for, and how does it solve it?
These are critical questions to ask at the start of any of these inquiries. And although it may well be that part of the process or solution involves lawyers or law firms, other parts of the solution don’t need to. Lawyers add expertise, lawyers add certainty — but they also add friction, in terms of costs and time. And most high-tech, innovative solutions can’t handle that.
Law firms, in a way, have positioned themselves between their clients and the solutions their clients want. That’s not a great place to be. Because if clients can go around you to get the solution that they want, they will. So whatever you can do to take out intermediate, unnecessary, costly, friction-heavy steps between the user and the end result, that’s what you want to try to do.
Is there a path forward where everyone wins?
There must be. You get a lawyer out of the atmosphere of a typical law firm and very often, that lawyer rediscovers her creativity, and solution-orientation and “I want to help” attitude. But law firms themselves are very difficult environments to introduce something new, to get a new idea approved, to get it funded, to get it executed and to get it sustained.
Now, that’s the law firm we have today. Increasingly, though, there are either new law firms that have come up in the last couple of years, or traditional law firms giving it their best to change their approach, and these are the firms that you want to go to — that you approach them and see a potential meeting of the minds.
What would you like to see come out of the hackathon?
For one thing, I’d like to see the hackathon establish and expand the Ottawa legal innovation community. And by that I mean hackers, but also people in law firms, in-house law departments, government, law schools, courts, and private industry who care about this. I have no idea how big that community is, to be honest. But I want to see it grow and flourish, just because that’s how great things are built.
It would also be great to see some kind of a prototype emerge from this event, something that somebody within the legal system itself would look at and say, “That could work,” either as it is or with adjustments.
It doesn’t have to be [somebody from] a court or law firm or the DOJ. It could be somebody in community services such as a domestic violence center, who says, “I don’t have any expertise on staff here for helping people get a restraining order slapped on an abusive husband,” and so they have to ask lawyers to do it pro bono. If they had a system they could plug into their computer and have the person sit down in front of it and feed information to it, and at the end of the process it could give them a solution and a document and a path forward, then that would be invaluable. That would really help. That would be a great solution.
How about long term?
Honestly, we have no idea what will come out of this — but the simple fact that we’re doing this is bigger than anything that could come out of it (unless what comes out of it is revolutionary, which of course would be awesome).
It’s really about normalization. If we can get to a point where, on a regular basis, people are coming together to continue building this legal innovation community and foster this ongoing initiative that says, “We’re trying to fix this broken system,” well, that’s a huge triumph right there.
Just keep on doing it, and make the people within the legal system, the insiders and the incumbents, understand that there’s nothing to be afraid of. We’re not building “robot lawyers” or whatever to take anybody’s job. What we’re trying to do is make the whole system work better. And I think we can.
The bet we’re making is that there are more people of good will in this industry and in this community than there are indifferent institutions of self-preservation. That’s what hackathons are really fundamentally about. And that’s what all these reform efforts are really about. And I’m personally willing to place that bet.
Jordan Furlong will address legal hackathon participants opening night of the Global Legal Hackathon event in Ottawa on February 23, 2018. For more insights into the current — and future — state of the legal industry, check out the Law21 blog.
