To Adopt Legal Tech, Lawyers Need to Start Thinking Like Entrepreneurs
Making a mental switch away from the past involves thinking differently about essential lawyer traits, in many cases, turning them on their head.
December 11, 2017 at 10:00 AM
14 minute read
Huge technological advancements are taking place in agriculture, aviation, engineering, energy, information technology, neuroscience, robotics, transportation, space exploration, and the list goes on. In this disruptive age, it is no surprise that the legal profession is itself facing up to its own unprecedented innovation challenge.
As professor Richard Susskind puts it in the book Tomorrow's Lawyers, the legal profession faces more disruption in the next two decades than it has seen in the past two centuries.
This new reality requires lawyers to increasingly act more like disruptive entrepreneurs, shifting away from our traditional mindset. This is not easy even for the most millennial-minded lawyer. Legal training and practice traditionally rests on looking at the past, like precedents and case law, rather than forward to the future.
The transition from a lawyer to a more entrepreneurial mindset is one I have confronted when I co-founded LawGeex, an AI contract review automation platform, in 2014. Formerly a commercial lawyer at a large firm, I realized that the old attributes drilled into me—perfection, risk averseness, confidentiality, and being in control—were costly, inefficient and sometimes destructive. Making a mental switch away from the past involves thinking differently about essential lawyer traits, in many cases, turning them on their head.
Based on my experience, there are a number of changes in mindset that lawyers need to focus on—all enabled and enhanced by adoption of technology.
1. Focus on the big picture
Lawyers traditionally focus on details. In particular, one of the main goals of lawyers is to flush out risk.
The problem is, lawyers sometimes become so risk averse that they alarm their clients regarding every minor risk. I have found that the best lawyers, in fact, put risk in perspective for their clients, addressing the chances of these risks actually materializing. By embracing technology, lawyers can now more than ever make this risk calculation and act like-data driven entrepreneurs, bringing the bigger picture into focus.
This has created a shift as a new breed of lawyers act as value-driven entrepreneurs. IP lawyers for instance, are increasingly using big data sets to more effectively analyze brands they are protecting. Pat Gelsinger, chief executive of cloud computing and visualization company, VMware, makes it clear he can be proud of his legal department's entrepreneurial reputation for value-creation: “While any legal department has to guarantee that risk is minimized, ours also creates value. There are metrics associated with everything they do.”
In other cases, better capturing of legal data will help ensure the legal department become the most reliable source for forecasting the next three months of sales in an organization.
2. Be optimistic
The entrepreneur-lawyer mindset involves having to be constantly, almost pathologically, optimistic, even in the face of short term setbacks.
In contrast, lawyers analyzing risks all day can suffer from Eeyore-like tendencies. Being cautiously optimistic about the future and finding ways to use technology to provide a better service is definitely a sign of an innovative lawyer. Interestingly, each lawyer I speak to that has carried out major change management agrees that there has never been a better time to be a lawyer when you are optimistic about the opportunities (despite many challenges along the way).
3. Collaborate
To survive, all entrepreneurs must by necessity collaborate. Each day as an entrepreneur I share sensitive information—from financials to intimate details on strategy and successes (and failures).
In contrast, though being discrete can be highly justified in law, it makes lawyers unnecessarily resist giving away hard-won information. However, the use of technology naturally promotes more and more collaboration. This includes codifying knowledge and legal processes, simplifying opaque legal processes (and language), and creating more equal sharing of information. Innovative lawyers actually enjoy this aspect of knowledge-sharing and decentralizing processes. This has a knock-on effect beyond their own businesses or clients. To take only one example, lawyers meeting and sharing their experiences during pilots of new technology acts as a major boost to the growth of more sophisticated legal technology, helping us receive the most engaged feedback to constantly enhance and improve our services.
4. Cede control
Lawyers tend to like control and centralization. This means tending to do more things on our own at our desk (this often manifests itself as “only I can do this”). As lawyers, we often believe we can do a task better and faster than anyone or anything else (including against proven technology). But, as entrepreneurs, we must by necessity cede control. I must find people better than myself to do the day-to-day running of parts of the business.
5. Hire diversely
The legal profession is used to working with people typically composed of people like themselves, with a similar education. But as an entrepreneur we need to have knowledge beyond our narrow training and pick up (and fast) “good enough”' skills, from marketing to R&D to operations, while also working on our management style and emotional intelligence. The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), for instance, sets out 12 core competencies underpinning the breadth and diversity required from a successful legal function in this disruptive age. As part of this move to diversity and depth, the term “non-lawyer” is thankfully falling into disuse by those pioneering change, symbolizing breadth and depth winning out over homogeneity.
6. Challenge assumptions
Central to most definitions of entrepreneurship is an inherent trait of looking at the world differently, and challenging assumptions. When I was a lawyer, I saw the painful and inefficient process of reviewing and approving standards contracts (reinventing wheels with every contract). I realized much of this drudge work could, and should, be automated. This led to me becoming an entrepreneur to solve this problem for forward-thinking clients.
But generally, lawyers remain wedded to tradition. We tend to be against experimentation, despite the status quo often being the hardest option.
Unsurprisingly, the curious and questioning entrepreneurial lawyer is the best customer for any legal technology company. These customers ask questions, use data, are more comfortable with change, and are more likely to become engaged and lasting advocates.
7. Be proud to be a lawyer; but prouder to be an entrepreneur
There is much to be proud of as a lawyer. Our skills are in demand in any age (take your pick from traits, such as working hard, problem-solving, and finding details others miss). But in this new innovative age, it is worth thinking about technology that will hone our habits towards a more entrepreneurial mindset.
The default of fast-emerging legal technologies is an appeal to the inner innovator. Whether it is software automating contract review and approval (LawGeex) to IP to legal research technology, these technologies exist to satisfy core innovation principles. This may include ensuring a more strategic overview, better use of data, more collaboration, and faster and more precise customer experience.
With optimized processes and adoption of technology, lawyers are finding an initial and powerful way to move away from the old school attorney mindset, instead harnessing the essential entrepreneurial qualities now shaping the profession.
Noory Bechor is CEO and co-founder of AI contract review and approval solution LawGeex.
Huge technological advancements are taking place in agriculture, aviation, engineering, energy, information technology, neuroscience, robotics, transportation, space exploration, and the list goes on. In this disruptive age, it is no surprise that the legal profession is itself facing up to its own unprecedented innovation challenge.
As professor Richard Susskind puts it in the book Tomorrow's Lawyers, the legal profession faces more disruption in the next two decades than it has seen in the past two centuries.
This new reality requires lawyers to increasingly act more like disruptive entrepreneurs, shifting away from our traditional mindset. This is not easy even for the most millennial-minded lawyer. Legal training and practice traditionally rests on looking at the past, like precedents and case law, rather than forward to the future.
The transition from a lawyer to a more entrepreneurial mindset is one I have confronted when I co-founded LawGeex, an AI contract review automation platform, in 2014. Formerly a commercial lawyer at a large firm, I realized that the old attributes drilled into me—perfection, risk averseness, confidentiality, and being in control—were costly, inefficient and sometimes destructive. Making a mental switch away from the past involves thinking differently about essential lawyer traits, in many cases, turning them on their head.
Based on my experience, there are a number of changes in mindset that lawyers need to focus on—all enabled and enhanced by adoption of technology.
1. Focus on the big picture
Lawyers traditionally focus on details. In particular, one of the main goals of lawyers is to flush out risk.
The problem is, lawyers sometimes become so risk averse that they alarm their clients regarding every minor risk. I have found that the best lawyers, in fact, put risk in perspective for their clients, addressing the chances of these risks actually materializing. By embracing technology, lawyers can now more than ever make this risk calculation and act like-data driven entrepreneurs, bringing the bigger picture into focus.
This has created a shift as a new breed of lawyers act as value-driven entrepreneurs. IP lawyers for instance, are increasingly using big data sets to more effectively analyze brands they are protecting. Pat Gelsinger, chief executive of cloud computing and visualization company, VMware, makes it clear he can be proud of his legal department's entrepreneurial reputation for value-creation: “While any legal department has to guarantee that risk is minimized, ours also creates value. There are metrics associated with everything they do.”
In other cases, better capturing of legal data will help ensure the legal department become the most reliable source for forecasting the next three months of sales in an organization.
2. Be optimistic
The entrepreneur-lawyer mindset involves having to be constantly, almost pathologically, optimistic, even in the face of short term setbacks.
In contrast, lawyers analyzing risks all day can suffer from Eeyore-like tendencies. Being cautiously optimistic about the future and finding ways to use technology to provide a better service is definitely a sign of an innovative lawyer. Interestingly, each lawyer I speak to that has carried out major change management agrees that there has never been a better time to be a lawyer when you are optimistic about the opportunities (despite many challenges along the way).
3. Collaborate
To survive, all entrepreneurs must by necessity collaborate. Each day as an entrepreneur I share sensitive information—from financials to intimate details on strategy and successes (and failures).
In contrast, though being discrete can be highly justified in law, it makes lawyers unnecessarily resist giving away hard-won information. However, the use of technology naturally promotes more and more collaboration. This includes codifying knowledge and legal processes, simplifying opaque legal processes (and language), and creating more equal sharing of information. Innovative lawyers actually enjoy this aspect of knowledge-sharing and decentralizing processes. This has a knock-on effect beyond their own businesses or clients. To take only one example, lawyers meeting and sharing their experiences during pilots of new technology acts as a major boost to the growth of more sophisticated legal technology, helping us receive the most engaged feedback to constantly enhance and improve our services.
4. Cede control
Lawyers tend to like control and centralization. This means tending to do more things on our own at our desk (this often manifests itself as “only I can do this”). As lawyers, we often believe we can do a task better and faster than anyone or anything else (including against proven technology). But, as entrepreneurs, we must by necessity cede control. I must find people better than myself to do the day-to-day running of parts of the business.
5. Hire diversely
The legal profession is used to working with people typically composed of people like themselves, with a similar education. But as an entrepreneur we need to have knowledge beyond our narrow training and pick up (and fast) “good enough”' skills, from marketing to R&D to operations, while also working on our management style and emotional intelligence. The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), for instance, sets out 12 core competencies underpinning the breadth and diversity required from a successful legal function in this disruptive age. As part of this move to diversity and depth, the term “non-lawyer” is thankfully falling into disuse by those pioneering change, symbolizing breadth and depth winning out over homogeneity.
6. Challenge assumptions
Central to most definitions of entrepreneurship is an inherent trait of looking at the world differently, and challenging assumptions. When I was a lawyer, I saw the painful and inefficient process of reviewing and approving standards contracts (reinventing wheels with every contract). I realized much of this drudge work could, and should, be automated. This led to me becoming an entrepreneur to solve this problem for forward-thinking clients.
But generally, lawyers remain wedded to tradition. We tend to be against experimentation, despite the status quo often being the hardest option.
Unsurprisingly, the curious and questioning entrepreneurial lawyer is the best customer for any legal technology company. These customers ask questions, use data, are more comfortable with change, and are more likely to become engaged and lasting advocates.
7. Be proud to be a lawyer; but prouder to be an entrepreneur
There is much to be proud of as a lawyer. Our skills are in demand in any age (take your pick from traits, such as working hard, problem-solving, and finding details others miss). But in this new innovative age, it is worth thinking about technology that will hone our habits towards a more entrepreneurial mindset.
The default of fast-emerging legal technologies is an appeal to the inner innovator. Whether it is software automating contract review and approval (LawGeex) to IP to legal research technology, these technologies exist to satisfy core innovation principles. This may include ensuring a more strategic overview, better use of data, more collaboration, and faster and more precise customer experience.
With optimized processes and adoption of technology, lawyers are finding an initial and powerful way to move away from the old school attorney mindset, instead harnessing the essential entrepreneurial qualities now shaping the profession.
Noory Bechor is CEO and co-founder of AI contract review and approval solution LawGeex.
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