Former IBM Watson's Brian Kuhn's New Role: Creating a Legal Tech GitHub
Brian Kuhn, who has now become the vice president of Elevate's new Digital Strategies and Solutions business, discusses how personalization and apps stores are becoming forces to be reckoned with inside the legal tech market.
January 14, 2020 at 02:48 PM
6 minute read
For Brian Kuhn, the name of the game is "personalization." Last week it was announced that Kuhn, the co-founder and former global leader of IBM Watson's legal consulting practice would join alternative legal service provider Elevate as its vice president of its new Digital Strategies and Solutions unit. In his new role, Kuhn will be focused on addressing the needs of legal departments and law firms undergoing digital transformations.
But how exactly does one go about such a task? For Kuhn, it's a lot like customizing a car. While the body might remain the same, individual components like the seat colors and steering wheels can be swapped out as needed—and the same general approach may be necessary in the future of legal software.
Below, Kuhn talks about creating an "internal GitHub" at Elevate and the missing link that may still be hindering legal departments' digitization. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In March 2019, Elevate's founder and executive chairman Liam Brown told LTN that he wants "Elevate to help law firms overcome their inability to invest in expensive technologies and resources that in-house clients increasingly desire." What's the primary barrier that firms are facing in that endeavor? Is it cost? Human resources? Something else?
Brian Kuhn: The something else factor weighs the heaviest. And that something else is the increasing expectations around personalization—personalized service, personalized results from software. Because people have developed consumer-grade expectations in their personal lives, and those have been carried through to their professional lives. Every time they interact with an app and get 24/7, 365-immediacy they come to rely on it …
In my opinion, good technology is now everywhere in the legal industry, which is great. That's great news. [But] the future I believe is not necessarily or not exclusively about providing good technology. That's table stakes. The future is about helping people apply it, given that there are so many options and given that so many of the technology offerings are themselves incredibly configurable and customizable.
In 2019 Elevate acquired several companies, among them LexPredict, which has an AI and data analytics component. How do you guys anticipate you'll be implementing those moving forward?
Speaking for my group, one of our goals is to create an internal GitHub analogue, where we're able to bring speed and scale to highly configurable, cost-effective engagements because we repurpose software elements. So that internal code base or repository of software tools, would include code that we extract from existing products and solutions. If we need the natural language processing capability of an existing Elevate capability we can take it out and just aggregate it. And we can take out user interface elements, the look and feel, connectors—meaning integration elements.
My goal with this business unit is to create an internal repository, a paint palette of different colors that we can draw from and that others can draw from to address customers' needs quickly and really deliver on personalization.
Just over a year ago, Gatner released the results of a survey indicating that 81% of legal departments are not prepared to support their company's digitization efforts. What do you think that the cause of that is?
This comes back to how to apply the technology … The problem is again not that there's [a shortage of] good technology, it's that the market has not yet been educated on how to apply that technology to business problems. So good news: Now technology is highly configurable. Bad news: Now you have to start thinking about business, which means that you need people who understand business people … who understands business problems and can translate them to a technologist and then work with a vendor.
It requires new conversations, and that's a change-management issue, and that's what I feel to be the real roadblock. The companies that have developed these highly configurable offerings are still selling them as if they are point solutions.
In a prior interview, Liam Brown told LTN that "general counsel are still comfortable buying legal services the traditional way." How do you bridge that gap between that demographic and perhaps the next generation of legal services customers who may have an entirely different set of preferences?
Seventy-five percent of insurance companies and the legal departments within them report that litigation management effectiveness is getting more attention from corporate leadership … Most legal departments still go over budget in their litigation spend in high-volume litigation industries like insurance and banking by about 37%. So I don't know why they are comfortable with it.
I would suggest many aren't given the increased scrutiny and trying to look for new options. Those options have not been available for a long time because they require customer specificity, they require the context that comes from customer specific data.
Last summer, Elevate made three of its products available on the Reynen Court legal tech app. As firms continue to gravitate towards "end-to-end" platforms, should we expect to see more app-stores for legal tech?
Absolutely. You should certainly expect to see app stores where the legal industry and certainly the regulatory bodies or professional associations within it agree upon the rules of the road for what is good machine learning and what is bad machine learning? What can be sold on this app store? And Reynen Court is doing as Apple did with its app store.
There are certain standards to sell an app and those standards in this industry, once they are figured out, will be standards of safety and standards of regulation. As long as they are adhered to people will have these safe app stores to go to and everything on the app store will interoperate, just as it does with Apple, which is one of the benefits.
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