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Let's add this up. Corporate legal departments have changed: “If you look at corporate legal departments, they're more and more like other business units,” says Daniel Linna, visiting professor of law at Northwestern Law. Alternative legal services providers have changed: “The law firms aren't the only game in town anymore, corporate legal departments can go to [other service providers],” he added.

Even law firms have changed: “We define the success of the legal industry on the gross revenue of law firms, and I think there's so much more there,” said John Fernandez, global chief innovation officer at Dentons.

So with all of this change, how exactly do we build the “next golden age of law,” as Fernandez put it? It's a matter of changing business strategies to adjust to this new paradigm, according to the panelists at the “Crossing Intersections—Dramatic Shifts in Legal Services” Tuesday keynote at ILTACON 2018. Linna and Fernandez were joined on the panel by John Elbasan, chief information officer at Willkie Farr & Gallagher, and Zabrina Jenkins, managing director at Starbucks. Jeff Schwarz, CEO at Concata and head of legal operations innovation at Hinshaw & Culbertson, moderated the panel.

According to Jenkins, it used to be the case that corporate legal was seen as a support function. “We were only contacted when there was an issue. Now, we're seen as a business partner for our clients,” she explained. “We wear many different hats, and when we look at our outside counsel, we expect them to take that same role.”

It's a case of shifting expectations, and technology is a major key to meeting those expectations. “What I see now happening is compartmentalization of commoditized product work,” Elbasan said. Proceduralized work is now taken care of by outside counsel, freeing law firms to perform more of that business partner.

Elbasan said his firm partners with a company called InCloud Counsel for much of this work. “Frankly, doing NDAs and due diligence is not where our niche and power structure is,” he explained.

Outsourcing, client relationships, flexible work—it may not sound like the sexiest topics for a legal technology conference. But according to Linna, that's exactly the point, as improving legal service delivery today doesn't necessarily mean adopting the latest and greatest technology.

“Of course we need to be thinking about forces that are going to disrupt us … but I think, especially in the legal industry, we're doing things the same way we did 100 years ago,” he noted. “Let's get back to some blocking and tackling principles and focus on some continuous improvement.”

Fernandez agreed right away. “In legal, there's so much hype around innovation,” he said. “It's really simple: It's about making things better for your client and your company… In law, it seems like we want to leap ahead to Star Wars and not do the heavy lifting we need to do right now.”

From the in-house example at Starbucks, Jenkins agreed. She said that technology can be a piece, but it's certainly not the only piece: “Our business is based on relationships, so when you're looking at innovation for us, it means innovating relationships.”

That's even more of a concern considering the instantaneous nature of today's communications, she added. E-discovery, litigation holds, and court papers can all be accessed electronically today. “There's so many things that I think have been beneficial to the practice of law,” she said. “But it also makes our need to be accessible more challenging; you can't turn things off like you could 10 to 15 years ago.”

Ultimately, then, it comes down to a simple question: What do your clients want? For Elbasan, this means trying different combinations of technologies to see what works best, and he uses attorneys and clients as the final arbiters of success. “Sometimes we build our own tech, but sometimes we take what is out there already, which is fantastic. … If you're not doing that already, you're behind,” he said.

As moderator, Schwartz asked the panel to explore where new technologies like AI then fit into this client-centric paradigm. Linna, who is teaching AI classes at Northwestern Law this fall, said AI and the client-centric view can certainly go hand in hand. “Enough with the AI 'projects,' let's solve actual problems. … AI is going to have an impact on this industry, just like it has in every other industry. But we need to complete the blocking and tackling first,” Linna said.

He added that real education is the first step to actually finding what problems AI could solve. “Vendors should demystify it. We should have them explain what exactly these technologies can do,” he said.

But for Fernandez, there's a bigger issue to AI adoption, and it gets to the heart of what still needs to be done for legal: “If you want to know why the legal industry in the main has not been more aggressive in adapting technology, it gets back to our business model. We suffer from this productivity paradox model. Until we really look at the business model and how we interact with clients—the billable hour, I'll say it—it's tough for law firms to even take a look at AI and price it.”

He said that until this is fixed, a lot of today's improvements are “nibbling around the edges.” He added, “There's a lot of interesting work that's doing value work for clients, which is appreciated. But nobody's really cracked the platform. I do think that's going to happen though, because the current model's not sustainable.”