Like at many other legal technology conferences, I’m sure that at ILTA last week in the US there was lots of questions about the billable hour, questions on when law firms are going to change and a good use of the good old buzzword “innovation”.
In fact a quick twitter search and I can find a few quotes from sessions:
No, the law firm business model is not the major barrier to legal innovation. It simply is not. It is a versatile model. Lack of business awareness, skill, and experience is what plagues legal market. #iltacon18 #biglaw
— Joshua Kubicki (@jkubicki) August 21, 2018
The big challenge to deal with at #ILTACON18 pic.twitter.com/JeWyDj1g9m
— ronfriedmann (@ronfriedmann) August 19, 2018
But what if the big thing that is really holding everything back isn’t a lack of desire or an inability to do so? Maybe it’s much more simple than that. This thought crossed my mind when I came across this article on UK productivity over the summer break, in particular this part:
“if you provide an economy with an almost endless supply of cheap labour as the UK government has, employers will use it instead of investing in any kind of productivity raising automation?”
I thought maybe this is it for law firms. There is certainly not a shortfall of the number of people entering law, in fact there are probably more than is needed. So are we simply seeing this over supply play through firms? Yes I know there are some exciting ventures into automation and machine learning, but I wonder whether they are mainly driven by marketing the firm than real productivity drivers in the firm?
I would be interested in hearing comments and thoughts, to me it doesn’t yet feel like we’ve hit the tipping point as we did in personal injury and insurance work. A point that really accelerated the use of case management technology in the late 90’s and led to boosted productivity and huge competition in that sector.
