Douglas Clark, managing partner of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. (Courtesy photo)

Aiming to attract a broader mix of clients, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati on Tuesday became one of the first Am Law 100 firms to formally launch a software development business.

The Silicon Valley-based firm has launched a subsidiary called SixFifty, named after the firm's address and area code in Palo Alto. Its first automated legal product, launching this spring, will draft documents for compliance with the California Consumer Privacy Act, which takes effect in January 2020.

Beyond that, SixFifty is building out a legal services automation platform that will ultimately provide services for both companies and consumers, said Douglas Clark, Wilson Sonsini's managing partner. SixFifty, like most automated legal services, will not provide legal advice.

“We're not trying to replace ourselves,” Clark said in an interview. “We're trying to help clients access sophisticated legal knowledge more efficiently.”

Wilson Sonsini's subsidiary is an early example of the various approaches law firms may take as they slowly implement technology into their business models. Chapman and Cutler, a Chicago-based Am Law 200 firm, last year became one of the first firms to sell a piece of software that was designed in-house at a law firm. Meanwhile, Atrium Law, a start-up funded by Silicon Valley venture capitalists, has developed a two-pronged business model more akin to a subsidiary that pairs a software development company with a more traditional law firm.

SixFifty has not received outside investment, Clark said, and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wilson Sonsini, which in 2017 had revenue of $797 million and profits per equity partner of about $2.2 million. The subsidiary is funded through the firm's balance sheet, Clark said.

SixFifty is led by Kimball Parker, who previously founded an innovation subsidiary at Salt Lake City-based Parsons Behle & Latimer that developed an automation tool to draft compliance documents for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Parker also oversees the LawX legal design lab at Brigham Young University's J. Reuben Clark Law School, which garnered attention for a website its students developed to help litigants fight debt collection cases without a lawyer.

Lincoln Porter, who worked with Parker on both those projects, has also joined SixFifty as chief information officer and chief technology officer.

The GDPR tool Parker helped develop at Parsons Behle sold an initial set of compliance documents for about $10,000, which Parker at the time said was about 10 percent of what those documents might cost to be completed without the technology.

Clark said Parker's previous success with the GDPR tool was “an important proof of concept,” but that SixFifty's approach was “something very unique and special with CCPA,” the California privacy regulation.

For his part, Parker said he was attracted to the partnership with Wilson Sonsini because of the quality of legal advice the firm's lawyers can offer and bake into their automated products.

For instance, the firm's privacy and data protection practice that is helping to develop the CCPA documents includes Lydia Parnes, the former director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission; Chris Olsen, the former assistant director of the FTC's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection; and Beth George, former deputy general counsel to the U.S. Department of Defense.

“What consumers want is the efficiency of automation and machines but with the expertise and judgment of a human behind it,” Parker said. “And so the future of the law, to me, is this human-machine mix. And what makes this really interesting is I'm confident we can build a very good machine, and Wilson Sonsini is the best human expertise in this field.”

The CCPA, which gives customers new levels of control over how businesses use or acquire their personal data, is anticipated to impact more than 500,000 companies in the U.S., according to an analysis by the International Association of Privacy Professionals. Most of those companies are small or mid-sized businesses, which may not be part of the high-end clientele Wilson Sonsini typically serves. Porter said those businesses would be in the sweet spot of SixFifty's offering.

“There are millions of businesses and people who would love to have [Wilson Sonsini's] expertise at their disposal,” Parker said. “And we thought we can take the expertise of Wilson lawyers, which is as good as anywhere in the world, and we can automate some of it to make it available to more businesses and people. And that is so exciting.”

Clients of the subsidiary don't necessarily have to be Wilson Sonsini clients, Parker and Clark said. But their hope is that some clients who use the automated SixFifty service will also use Wilson Sonsini's lawyers for legal advice.

Clark said he was not concerned that automating legal work would cannibalize what lawyers have traditionally done by hand.

“My view, and this could be just a function of what I've done for nearly 30 years, is that the judgment and expertise [lawyers] bring on complex matters … will never be automated and will never be supplanted by machine learning,” Clark said. “There are many functions, however, within the ambit of what law firms have traditionally done that can be made so much more efficient by using technology and making it more available to clients and prospects.”

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