Fringe Legal Presents Bots @ Work

Fringe Legal Presents Bots @ Work

By Abhijat SaraswatBusinessTechnology
Download on the App Store

Fringe Legal Presents Bots @ Work episodes

  • Digital Transformation and designing the future of law with Kai Jacob

    On this episode with speak with Kai Jacob  - Partner at KPMG and Co-founder of Liquid Legal Institute - about digital transformation and designing the future of law. 


    In the episode we cover (min.seconds):

    • Introduction -> 0.20
    • Enthusiasm vs adoption of technology -> 1.56
    • Founding the think thank -> 3.24
    • Facilitating cross collaboration -> 5.06
    • Distributing projects equitably -> 6.04
    • Designing the future -> 10.14
    • Mental wellbeing -> 13.52
    • Skills for future lawyers -> 21.54
    • Being embedded with customers -> 27.12

    Highlights from the episode 

    What is Liquid Legal Institute

    We consider ourselves a collaboration community of doers. So we like to do stuff, everything that we tackle and that we focus on should lead very fast to a result. Not just talking, doing.

    Lack of collaboration in the legal market

    ...they helped us really to nail down the question of 'why is the legal market not collaborating'? That was a very interesting question because we are all sharing, we all do this together. We even have this concept of Co-opetition. Then why not work with competitors on something like setting standards? Why should we, in the legal market, cooperate? We are all making good money with this private wisdom that we have and built up over time. So why should we share? We also believe that without sharing, without creating true standards in the market, it will take ages to go through this digital transformation.

    Struggling with digital transformation

    We see that people are really struggling with digital transformation. They first don't understand why all this is happening. They're missing the digital mindset.The idea that digital transformation is something positive. They do not get the link back to legal because, they are thinking that what we do is something that's handcrafted; it's something that relies on very special knowledge.We do a perfect job of creating the perfect, beautiful contract that nobody else understands. We see beauty. And we see our role in protecting our company and defending our companies, defending our client's interests. It's just that the other side doesn't understand it.So the digital aspect is that we need to get more out of this dormant contract that's archived in the file cabinet somewhere. To make it valuable information, accessible for the digital company that we are working in.The whole idea of digital transformation is to make information that sits somewhere in an unstructured format, deep in contracts, more accessibleWe miss a huge opportunity for our profession to sit at the C-suite table and contribute to the overall goals of the enterprise. Second, everything moves so fast. We are overwhelmed with the speed of change. And we need to understand that change is constant and it will never go back to a slow motion mode. It will not happen. It will be fast. So we need to learn how to become adaptable, call it agile, call it whatever, but we need to adapt fast to a changing world. We need first to understand what is digital, and second how to deal with that in an agile working model.

    About Liquid Legal Institue

    The Liquid Legal Institute is an open and interdisciplinary platform for promoting a new way of thinking in the legal sector. Digitalization, new business models and technological innovations are currently changing all major industries worldwide. However, the legal sector has not yet benefited sufficiently from these trends. The Liquid Legal Institute was founded by seven experts from legal and business practice, design thinking, and computer science to close this gap.

    33 min
  • Value based pricing for law firms with Keith Maziarek

    Lawyers and firms have long struggled to find the right way to price their services.


    The hourly billing model focuses on the amount of time spent on a matter, project, or case. This can often lead to inefficiencies and frustration for the lawyer and the client. Value based pricing is an alternative that takes into account the value of the service being provided rather than simply the time spent. It means that lawyers and firms are paid based on the results they achieve for their clients.


    The incentive becomes focused on getting better results. Value-based pricing can also help build trust and improve communication between lawyers and clients.


    However, that doesn't make pricing or pricing conversations any easier. In this episode, we go into the rabbit hole of pricing. 

    SUBSCRIBE AND REVIEW    :  iTunes // Spotify // Pocket Casts // Stitcher


    Special thanks to     Paul Stroka of LexFusion for making the introduction to Keith.


    Episode content

    • Introduction and summary ➡ 1.24
    • Power of buyer ➡ 4.30
    • Power of supplier ➡ 7.34
    • Elastic economic market ➡ 9.42
    • Price discrimination ➡ 13.14
    • Client sophistication ➡ 17.08
    • Inflation and pricing for specialized services ➡ 23.46
    • The next service delivery model ➡ 31.04


    Here are some of our favorite takeaways from the episode (edited to be reading-friendly).


    Value of work

    One of the things that get ignored in discussions with clients or in the clients' calculus and how they determine what they're getting for the bills they're paying is that there's never a very accurate way of measuring the value that was captured from the services, and what the outcome was.It's always what was that bill? That bill is high. Maybe you bought a company, in an M&A scenario, that had subsidiaries or locations in highly regulated, highly risky territories - where there's a ton more work to be done. It's not an apples-to-apples kind of company. So you don't look at what I got for the price I paid? You're just saying the bills are higher now.


    Price discrimination

    Ab: How do you demonstrate that we're going to charge you X, and it's worth more than X to you as an outcome?Keith: Price discrimination is the short answer to that. Not everything is worth the same amount. By nature, and this is not any judgment or me trying to take a position on the actual value or the value of the practitioners doing this kind of work. But by nature, there's a spectrum of complexity, and the stuff that's really complex on the highly complex side tends to be more scarce. There is a more scarce supply of people who can do it.On the opposite side, on a more commoditized side or the more routine side - it's not as complex, and there are more options to avail yourself of to do that work.


    Client sophistication - apply the scalpel, not the hatchet

    My particular role is to ensure that the firm is as profitable as possible and that we're making our clients as happy as possible in terms of service delivery models and getting the outcomes they want.


    The conversation with the client depends on the level of sophistication:

    I'd say architecting and implementing some of those solutions depends on the sophistication that the client or the person on the buy-side has. There are only so many levers in this business in terms of what I can do. It's all about service delivery models and the underlying economics. This isn't astrophysics. There are not huge, massively complex data jobs in most cases (there are some benefits to that in different scenarios).There are a couple of levers on who's going to do the work and how much they have to do, what's the cheapest way to do it, and what the outcome will be. How do those things correlate (the price to the product)? Having those conversations with people that understand that better is important.I've worked with several legal operations groups where they have the knowledge, the understanding, and the sophistication. Still, there's a gap in the level of influence they have over the in-house attorneys...


    Different sides of the table, same challenges:

    We have very similar challenges - in-house and the law firm side - as it relates to getting the lawyers to understand the economics, the process, and to engage attorneys with it - to really adopt it. As opposed to, 'Yeah, but I'm skeptical of that because I don't understand it. So let's just do it the old way.'


    Next service delivery model

    Where can I get efficiencies out of technology? Which is a hugely growing market, that's going to be the new paradigm shift. It's going to be a much more dynamic service delivery model...Given that we've got a shortage of supply of people with the requisite skills to do a lot of this work and that's why we have to charge more. They [the attorneys] also have been working ridiculous man hours, and that's why we have to pay more for that. On top of that, there are obviously the mental health and quality of life concerns which is why a lot of people leave the workforce.I've been trying to make the case, and we work with our innovation group a lot, too, with several different teams internally to say: 'if you don't want people burnt out, you want them to have a better level of work-life balance and job satisfaction. Don't force them to brute force their way through everything all the time.'If you can get 30% more productivity out of the same people and let them sign off at seven or eight at night and use some tool that scales their productivity and delivers efficiencies then do it. You still get the same outcome, you just don't have to have as much input to have the same output.


    Resources mentioned

    • Off The Clock Podcast
    • Porter's Five Forces and a deeper look at Buyer Power
    • 🎧 Janet Stanton – Benefits of a Strategic Client Management Program
    • 🎧 Rasmeet Charya – Using technology to maximize the value of legal services
    • Smart collaboration for lawyers and law firms with Dr. Heidi Gardner


    About Keith Maziarek


    Keith Maziarek     has been building and leading legal services pricing/legal project management/profitability functions since 2009. He is currently Director of Pricing and Legal Project Management

    38 min
  • Leading through a crisis with Alex Tsepko

    Leading teams during times of crisis presents a unique challenge. Many of which are multiplied when you are a startup and the team was only formed months ago. 

    And then, overnight, everyone suddenly felt very fragile. It's a unique feeling and unique in a bad way because suddenly you have no idea what to do. And the feeling is that you're very lost.

    Yet, that is exactly the challenge that faced Alex Tsepko, CEO of Lawrina - a website that provides useful content and productivity tools for lawyers. The entire team for Lawrina was in Ukraine, and things changed overnight as the country was invaded. 


    Lawrina CEO, Alex Tsepko, speaks about his experience leading a newly formed team through a sudden crisis - the invasion of Ukraine - and finding growth through a shared vision. 

    In this episode, we cover (timestamps in parenthesis):

    • Introduction (0:20)
    • Ukraine as a hub for IT innovation (1:38)
    • Experiencing unexpected crisis as a young organization (3:22)
    • Leading through a crisis (6:08)
    • Finding growth through a shared vision (11:57)

    Recognizing that it wasn't possible to continue doing anything the old way, Alex ensured that his team was safe and pivoted to continue working to execute their vision. The business went from a domestic play to having an international group with traffic growing 35%+ each month.

    As Alex shares, "it was not easy," but the team came together during a time when they felt fragile to build something they believed in.

    Alex Tsepko is the CEO of Lawrina.com. You can connect with Alex on LinkedIn.

    If you like the show, then I know you'll love the Fringe Legal newsletter which is full of interviews, articles, and reports to help Legal innovators like yourself learn how to put ideas into practice and find success. You can sign up for free at FringeLegal.com. 

    16 min
  • Creativity in law firms with Dale Miller

    What role does creativity play in a law firm and legal practice? 
     

    "You can be creative in any industry and anything that you do. Creativity is a mindset. It's being open to new ideas, new trends that diversity of thought, as we mentioned, being willing to experiment and try things, seeing things through a different lens than people typically do.
     
    To me, that's what creativity really is. It doesn't mean you have to invent something new and be insanely innovative. It just means you can look at a lot of things that are out there and say, 'Hey, you know what? That's interesting. Maybe we can use that somehow.'"


    In this episode, we cover:

    • The role of creativity in law firms
    • The increased focus on pricing
    • Why firms are struggling with being client-centric
    • What will make future firms successful
    • Marketing as an underutilized superpower


    Read the Fringe Legal newsletter which includes additional commentary on each of the topics.

    About Dale Miller

    Dale Miller is a Business Development and Marketing strategist with 20 years of experience and expertise in professional services firms, the advertising industry, and technology startups.
     
    She has held Director of Marketing and Business Development positions at regional and international firms, in the legal and financial industries, leading strategy, content, business development, and strategic partnerships. Dale is currently a Practice Development Manager at Holland & Knight.
     
    Prior to her work in legal, Dale founded and ran businesses, including a marketing consultancy and her talent agency, Miller Creative Partners, which represented photographers and directors, and worked with national ad agencies and their blue-chip clients.
     
    She has served on the Board of Lawyers for the Creative Arts, and is an active member of Northwestern University’s Law and Technology Initiative. 

    33 min
  • The Future of Work with Matt Coatney

    Matt Coatney is a seasoned C-level product and technology executive, entrepreneur, advisor, author, and speaker with 25 years of experience helping businesses and technology work better together. He has led divisions and portfolios for large global corporations, co-founded three companies and advised several others, been an early-stage employee of two successful tech startups, advised dozens of business and technology professionals across all stages of company formation and growth, and launched over a dozen successful products.

    Episode content

    • The future of work ➡ 03.34
    • How would work be delivered in the future ➡ 04.52
    • Legal matters as projects ➡ 05.51
    • (Alternative) career paths for lawyers ➡ 07.36
    • The role of technology in the delivery of legal service ➡ 09.27
    • Why change now? ➡ 12.17
    • Disrupt the status quo ➡ 14.46
    • Are you profitable? Pricing analytics at law firms ➡ 15.59
    • Experience Management, BD, and contract analytics ➡ 17.41
    • Learning from adjacent industries ➡ 20.24
    • Making inclusion work in a hybrid world ➡ 32.13

    Resources mentioned

    • The Human Cloud Book
    • Human Cloud Podcast
    • Joyce Tong Oelrich on law firms as a subscription business


    Subscribe to Fringe Legal for deeper insights from each episode

    37 min
  • Implementing emerging technologies with Leigh Snider

    Technology is a frequent topic of conversation. It comes up almost every single episode. And while it's fun to talk about amazing new tools or features, ultimately, you have to tie the tech back to the business strategy. Easy to say, difficult to execute.

    It's harder still when tracking and working with emerging technology, where there may not yet be a baseline for success. We tackle those points and so much more in the episode today.

    Episode content

    • What is IncuBaker  ➡ 2.46
    • Watching the market ➡ 4.04
    • Client needs ➡ 5.03
    • Tracking 500+ legal tech companies ➡  6.17
    • Tying tech to business objectives ➡ 7.29
    • A process-driven approach to technology selection ➡ 11.30
    • Working with Vendors ➡ 16.22
    • Working with emerging technologies ➡ 20.31
    • Validating ideas ➡ 23.46
    • Market trends ➡ 32.31

    For more detailed notes visit www.fringelegal.com

    37 min
  • Disrupting lawyer training with antiCPD with Quddus Pourshafie

    On the podcast this week, I speak to Quddus Pourshafie, co-founder of antiCPD a new training business looking to flip the necessary evil of CPD on its head. They have a bold vision:

    Essentially, we want it to be the most AntiCPD CPD training you've ever seen. CPD is one of the least favorite activities of any lawyer, right? It's something that must be done, but no one particularly enjoys that period of time. Or if it's spread throughout the year most people tick it off. It's a checkbox item. And now that it's virtual and prerecorded people can freely fall asleep... So that's one aspect that we wanted to completely blow out the water.
    19 min
  • Joyce Tong Oelrich on law firms as a subscription business
    I don't think we thought that it was going to be as tough of a sell because most of our clients that we have worked with and that we know very well and know how they sell, how they operate, they're all SaaS companies. So they all sell, software as a service, which is a subscription model. And we thought this would be something that, of course, they would understand the benefits of it because they're saying to their customers, here's the benefit of a subscription. It's really hard,  for the legal field to turn that corner because law traditionally has already been 10 steps behind in terms of technology. Compared to even the largest, corporate companies. So law firms are already lagging in that way. And to throw this at in-house counsel,  we were overly optimistic to think that they would swarm to adopt this idea.


    Joyce Tong Oelrich is the co-founder of the recently launched boutique, Tong Tejani PLLC, specializing in government contracting.

    Prior to the launch of her practice, Joyce was an in-house attorney at Facebook and Microsoft Corporation for nearly a decade, focusing on government contract compliance.

    In this episode, we explore why Joyce left to start her own firm, and how she, together with her Partner, created a firm with a difference. 


    Resource mentioned

    Paul Graham on 'do things that don't scale'


    32 min
  • How to delight clients with Julia Salasky

    Julia Salasky is the CEO of Legl, a digital workflow tool for law firms. 

    "Solving problems that are fundamental to the way lawyers work enables lawyers to focus on the work that highly skilled professionals that they are can do best. I don't have a view as to whether in five years or ten years or 25 years, you can train AI to do those jobs, but the work that lawyers do is so varied, so technical, and so human-centric that enabling them to do that work in a way that allows them to focus on the highest value piece of that is where there's a real opportunity in this space."



    29 min

About Fringe Legal Presents Bots @ Work

From the publisher's feed

Bots at Work is the new season from Fringe Legal, which explores how AI is changing the way work gets done, with a focus on real-world impact over hype. It looks at how operators, builders, and…