The Memorial Day holiday may have made for a short work week, but that didn't keep readers from taking time to weigh in about aspects of the legal industry that are ripe for change. This week: Assessing AI's allure, and getting lawyers to buy in. Email me here or sign up to receive this newsletter here.

Changing Practice: Who's at the Wheel?

Let's start with Artificial Intelligence. There's a conviction among AI evangelists that law firms are sitting on a gold mine of data based on their own past work—if only they would take advantage of it.

Ed Walters, the former Covington & Burling attorney who founded online legal research software company Fastcase, emphasized that rather than just blindly amassing this data, firms can be feeding it into a number of cloud-based AI tools to help identify trends and patterns, especially when viewed in comparison to a wider bucket of data. Litigators, for example, can measure their firm's success rate on certain types of motions in certain venues against wider statistics.

Walters argues that such tools can outperform even the best lawyers' own intuition, which is necessarily bound by their circumscribed personal experience.

Sounds persuasive. What I want to know is whether any of you litigators or dealmakers out there are open minded about this kind of approach but have found the tools out there wanting?

I'm assuming that lawyers who've signed up to get this briefing in their inbox are more curious than most about adopting new tools to transform their practice. London-based Duane Morris partner Alex Geisler made the case to me that even some of your more stubborn colleagues are willing to embrace certain plug-and-play technologies that've been vetted by others.

The question is whether they are simply going through the motions or are willing to reevaluate how they fundamentally operate. Geisler, who's authored the educational program Lean Adviser Legal in partnership with ALM, says that all too often, it's the former. Lawyers are resistant to changing their behavior.

Even his partners at Duane Morris, who have free access to the program, have been resistant to dipping into its suite of daily lessons and tools to learn about how they could be working more efficiently. It's a little different where he exercises more control: the 10 attorneys in his transportation and automotive group are all getting certified in the program.

Like so many of the transformations in the industry, the impetus is going to have to come from the client side. Just as general counsel have found that they need to demand their law firms improve on diversity or risk losing business, through the power of the purse, they can push for more efficient service delivery. The message? Change how you operate, find a way to do the work within budget and on time, or we're going somewhere else.

Where else can we expect the buyers of legal services to push for change?

In the News

➤➤Foreign law firms have long been barred from operating in India, but my Hong Kong-based colleague John Kang reports that the Big Four's efforts to create a workaround for legal services might be putting them in hot water. EY and PwC, who operate alliances with local law firms, and Deloitte and KPMG, who don't, all risk discipline from the country's accounting firm regulator if the Bar Council of Delhi, which regulators lawyers, finds them in violation. In my reporting on the Big Four, I'm repeatedly told that regulatory obstacles are bound to fall. But in India, observers have been predicting the liberalization of the legal market for almost two decades, and nothing seems to budge.

➤➤John also had the story of Sydney-based Tony O'Malley, the head of PwC's legal services arm for Australia and New Zealand, replacing Heinz-Klaus Kroppen as the global leader of the Big Four firm's legal services offering. PwC was the one holdout that didn't make their global law leader available for my deep dive into the Big Four last year, so I can't speak to Kroppen's stewardship. But the firm has found ways to raise its profile in the U.S., allying with immigration law pacesetter Fragomen and opening up a U.S. firm in D.C. to advise American clients on international matters. I'll be curious if this interest in testing the American waters continues under O'Malley.

➤➤I enjoyed this FT profile of former Gibson Dunn and O'Melveny partner Jim Walden, who founded Walden Macht & Haran several years ago. He's recently been battling to clean up international sports, and was blindfolded and subjected to extensive detours for his first client meeting with Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of Moscow's anti-doping laboratory.

Back again next Thursday! Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]. Sign up here to receive The Law Firm Disrupted as a weekly email.