It used to be so simple. A client would ask a law firm to pick up a job, a partner would grab a few associates and get to work, some long nights and elbow grease later, there'd be a trial or a settlement or some sort of specialized advice. Straightforward. Easy.

Yes, I'm grossly simplifying things, but given the interconnected webs of today's average litigation, legal work of just 50 years ago looks like games of Pong compared to today's World of Warcraft-like need to multiple party coordination. You have tech providers and their 3000 flavors, ranging from e-discovery to legal research. You have business consultants, insurance consultants. You still have corporate clients, but those corporate clients have all new pressures, with boards and C-suites taking an active interest in legal to levels never before seen.

And in the middle of all of this, there's New Law. Sometimes called managed service providers, sometimes called alternative legal service providers, and its definition spanning from the Big 4 to individual companies to law firm subsidiaries, New Law and its increasing number of providers have been at the center of a lot of conversations over the past several years. But amidst all this talk, few people seem to have a handle on what this new market actually is. There remains a lot of back-and-forth about where New Law fits into litigation or a legal department, whether they're competitors or collaborators with law firms, and just how wide the definition of what a New Law provider should be.