The term “law new” is a catchall industry term, linked to concepts such as legal technology, legal operations, ALSPs and other forms of legal innovation. It is often viewed as a piece of the puzzle called law modernization, which refers to a paradigm shift from legal delivery to customer impact and enhanced experience.
New law, in practice, focuses on offering the kind of legal help that can be done more efficiently and serves as a secondary focus for a firm’s main legal efforts. As a result, the goal is to produce more value for clients while reducing costs.
There are many aspects of this type of service, ranging from e-discovery to litigation support and patent prosecution. It can also involve a variety of other areas such as risk management, regulatory and compliance, and corporate counseling. This form of practice can serve as a source of revenue for firms, especially those that have struggled to make a profit under a traditional hourly billing model.
A big part of this is collaboration. It involves working across the enterprise and with non-legal functions to address significant, complex, global challenges that cannot be mastered by any one function, business unit, or stakeholder group. It also involves working with legal colleagues to identify, eradicate, mitigate and extinguish risks, free-up management to focus on core objectives, and identify and capture business opportunities. The new law function and its cross-functional enterprise colleagues will work together to be proactive in addressing risks and opportunities, and this collaborative process will require the right skillsets including data agility.
This is the ability to quickly capture, unify and apply human and artificial intelligence to data in a manner that produces real-time refresh and drives decisions. It will allow the legal function and its enterprise colleagues to produce more accurate, cost-effective and practical solutions to once-bespoke legal matters; it will help them avoid the significant lost opportunity costs of protracted disputes; and it will enable them to produce better-informed risk assessment and decision making.
This type of legal collaboration is commonplace in many industries, particularly those that have to work with a high degree of complexity and speed to respond to rapidly changing business realities. For example, in the automotive industry, major competitors like GM and Ford collaborate to develop a wide range of products. The same is true of the pharmaceutical industry when it comes to research and development, which often involves collaboration between rival companies working together on joint ventures and other projects. It’s just a matter of time before the legal industry begins to fully embrace the fluidity and collaborative processes that have become the norm in other industries.