From September 12th – September 13th, 2019 the Harvard Law & Technology Society organized and hosted the 2019 Harvard Legal Technology Symposium at Harvard Law School, the largest student organized legal technology event in the world. For LECARE, a German legal technology family business and industry veteran that has been developing legal practice management software for more than 30 years, the symposium was an absolute highlight of this year’s conference line up. The symposium was impressive not only because it brought together a uniquely interdisciplinary and international community, but also because it was highly focused on encouraging and facilitating a debate about how technology can improve and shape the law in the future. As a guidance, three interrelated themes were discussed during the symposium: How will technology impact legal practice? How should legal education react to the increasing importance of legal technology? And how will technology change the legal career trajectories of practicing attorneys and law school graduates?
Robert Mahari, President of the Harvard Law & Technology Society, opened the symposium by underlining the fact that “the legal world is changing and evolving while technology is playing an increasingly important role in both the practice and study of law.” Overall, the symposium did not only embrace a variety of captivating keynotes and interdisciplinary panels by legal technology providers and different kinds of industry experts, but also encompassed keynotes by the renowned Professor David B. Wilkins and Professor Richard Susskind.
Professor David B. Wilkins, the Lester Kissel Professor of Law (, Vice Dean for Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession, and Faculty Director of the Center on the Legal Profession and the Center for Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry) at Harvard Law School, held a keynote about “the Changing Nature of Careers”. According to Wilkins, in the legal profession’s recent history, most law firms and in-house legal departments have tended to divide their organizations into two groups of “lawyers” and “non-lawyers”. In both law firms and in-house legal departments, lawyers have been viewed responsible for doing the “real” work of the firm and for generating revenue, whereas “non-lawyers” have traditionally been treated as “support staff”. This difference has had important implications for the careers of those in each group. On the one hand, for lawyers there has always been a defined career path, with typically two classification of lawyers – associates, on the “partner track” and equity partners. Over the last few decades, this clear career trajectory has become more complex, with new “lawyer” designations within firms, including non-equity partner, of counsel, permanent associates, or contract lawyers. For these new categories of lawyers, legal organizations have worked hard to provide new career paths. On the other hand, for those, who are not lawyers, there has never been a clear career path within most legal organizations, beyond those for purely clerical staff, even though these roles have been proliferating in recent years. Overall, these traditional practices are increasingly at odds with the new normal of progressively sophisticated clients with more access to information and stronger demands for more transparency from firms. This has forced firms to employ efficient unbundling and repackaging of services and to move toward “value billing”. Furthermore, new competitors have emerged, offering integrated services at the intersection of law, finance, strategy, and project management. Examples of such competitors are legal tech providers, LPOs or the Big 4. On the one side, this puts pressure on the historic law firm business model of rate increases, leverage, and bespoke work. At the same time, it also pressures GCs to source work more efficiently and effectively to solve increasingly complex problems revolving around data security and governance, risk and crisis management, as well as and fragmented regulatory regimes. Neither group is designed for nor currently equipped with the appropriate resources to tackle the increased complexity and new requirements brought about by the new normal. For one the existing personnel should acquire new skills following the idea of “T-shaped” lawyers, i.e. lawyers with deep subject expertise complemented by a broad skill set that increasingly should include an understanding for technology. But also, should new types of people be hired to take on new types of roles that are created to help address these massive new changes to the marketplace. Examples of roles that have since proliferated are Chief Operating Officers; Chief Diversity/Inclusion Officers; Chief Strategy Officers; Chief Culture Officer; and Chief Innovation Officer/Head of Legal Operations. To better understand how law firms and in-house legal departments are incorporating new technologies, processes, and other forms of innovation into their organizations, the Center of the Legal Profession of Harvard Law School has been undertaking a major research project. First results were shared, among others, facts about the current composition of legal departments and law firms. According to the survey, legal departments are made up 70% by female and 30% by male colleagues, whereas the average law firm composition is almost inverted with 72% men and 28% women. Finally, Professor David B. Wilkins highlighted the different composition of support systems and resistance groups within legal departments and law firms, which have to respectively be leveraged on the one hand and overcome on the other hand by the Heads of Legal Operations and the Heads of Law Firm Innovation to implement and foster innovation.
Professor Richard Susskind OBE, a pioneer and expert in the future of professional services and legal technology, opened his keynote by pointing out something fundamental about today’s society: “more people have access to the internet than access to justice”. Among others, Professor Susskind talked about two major concepts: “online dispute resolution” and “online courts”.
According to Susskind, the origins of online dispute resolution (ODR) lie in alternative dispute resolution (ADR). ADR uses methodologies such as mediation or negotiations to resolve disputes outside of courts. Over time, ADR eventually evolved into electronic ADR through the increased use of technologies to facilitate dispute resolution. Nowadays, electronic ADR is well established to solve low-value disputes beyond the court systems using methods based on technology. ADR is not significantly different from conventional court hearings, as there are still arbitrators or a tribunal chairs involved. However, electronic ADR brought about a fundamental change by transforming dispute resolution from a physical room to conducting it online. Through many private sector initiatives electronic ADR has improved and has evolved into ODR. In ODR, cases are not necessarily decided according to law or justice, but often rather through compromise or negotiation. Susskind is of the opinion that a vital aspect of the rule of law should be a readily available court system that functions effectively, is well regarded and that puts through a significant number of cases, to reinforce the confidence in the law and the justice system. However, as an increasing number of cases are no longer resolved in the court system, ODR is seen by some as a threat that may diminish the courts’ significance and the relevance of the justice system.
An answer to this worry is a new concept of online courts. Susskind distinguishes between two generations of online courts. The first generation of online courts involve the use of technology in addition to and beyond the traditional court services and includes ODR. However, this first generation of online courts regards technology and ODR rather as an alternative to the classic court system, instead of embracing them entirely themselves. According to Susskind, the second generation of online courts could leverage technology to deliver the court service in an entirely new way. Given a simplified public court system, cases would be kept within the court system and would be resolved using new techniques and technologies, thus reinforcing the importance and relevance of the court system, thus reinforcing the relevance of the law. The idea is to use technology as an integral part of the new court service, instead of simply adding technology to the old court system. This new court system should be affordable, quick and intelligent focusing on low-value disputes to begin with. It should enable non-lawyers to manage their own cases, and provide them with tools to assess and formulate their complaints. Cases would not primarily be handled by judges, but by case officers, who help assess whether there is a compelling reason for cases to qualify as disputes to be handled by the judicial court service. Those qualified cases could be dealt with asynchronously, eliminating the need for all parties to having to attend court session in the same physical place or a virtual space at the same time. The parties would submit evidence and arguments to an online platform, which then would be assessed by the judges, who can deliver their decision or judgement via the electronic platform as well – a concept named by Susskind as “online judging”. In addition, the idea of “extended courts” envisions court services to embrace and exploit technology to help parties understand their legal rights and obligations, and the options available to them, to help them frame and present their arguments, and to provide the first layer of facilitation to identify which cases necessarily have to proceed to a judge. Technologically speaking, Susskind admits, this is not radical. However, given the last 900 years of court history, the second generation of online courts resemble a revolution. More detailed information about online courts, their benefits and the objections against them can be found in Susskind’s new book “Online Courts and the Future of Justice” that is going to be published this fall.
Finally, Susskind recommends lawyers to adopt a more customer-centric mindset. Just as most customers do not want to buy a screwdriver for the tool’s sake, but rather buy it to make a hole, this concept of jobs to be done may also be applied to the legal industry: “people do not want lawyers, but they want the outcome lawyers bring” and “people do not want courts, but they want to have their disputes resolved”. Food for thought.
Besides those two remarkable keynotes, the symposium had many more inspiring and thought-provoking keynotes and interdisciplinary panels comprised of new as well as established, market leading legal technology providers and a variety of industry experts. Among others, AJ Shankar founder of Everlaw talked about the emerging role of computer science in legal technology, Jack Newton described the magnificent rise and success of CLIO, and Colin Lachance from vlex explained how AI can be “accessible for all” in the new era of unbundling and rapid prototyping. Moreover, Charley Moore founder of Rocket Lawyer presented his 10 Legal Tech Commandments: (1) love the law as it should be, (2) listen intently to customers and nonbelievers, (3) innovate to solve somebody’s problems, (4) go all in, (5) make money, (6) laugh a lot, (7) be ready to fight, (8) remember that it’s a team sport, (9) change course so the wind is in your sails, and (10) execute.
For a German legal technology pioneer and veteran like LECARE, these visions and newest insights from the US legal industry were eye-opening and truly inspiring. The German legal industry differs from the US one in several ways and generally tends to lag behind the US by approximately 5 years, mostly in terms of readiness of adoption in most law firms and legal departments. The most fundamental distinction from the US is that Germany does not have a case law based system, but instead a civil law system. This, for example, drastically reduces the need and desire for eDiscovery solutions in Germany, as judgments are rarely based on previous cases and decisions but instead based on the civil law, eliminating the need for eDiscovery. However, most other areas of legal technology are highly interesting for the German legal industry as well. Besides the established enterprise legal management solutions, such as LECARE’s practice management solution for legal departments, an increasing number of legal technology startups are emerging in the contracting space, ranging from contract drafting and negotiation, to contract review, analysis, extraction and analytics. Further, many legal technology companies try to improve access to justice in Germany. As a result, many online legal advice portals and marketplaces, online databases and self-service platforms, as well as consumer-focused legal service providers helping users enforce consumer-rights have been established. Moreover, technologies such as blockchain and AI are increasingly being leveraged and implemented in German legal technology solutions. Finally, legal design and legal operations have also gained in popularity and adoption, with the Legal Design Summit in Helsinki and the CLOC London Institute having become the reference conferences for those concepts in Europe, respectively. Overall, the US legal industry seems to be more advanced in terms of maturity and adoption of legal technology than the German legal industry. However, it must be considered that the German legal industry faces very different challenges. Not only does Germany have much stricter data protection standards than the US, especially since the introduction of GDPR, but also the level of adoption of and the trust in cloud-based technologies is much lower, currently still strongly limiting the potential of many German legal technology solutions. At the same time, these challenges provide the German industry with numerous new windows of opportunity for legal innovation in our home market. Since more than 30 years, we at LECARE merrily look to our fellow US legal technologists and enthusiastically exchange insights across the Atlantic. We are excited to continue to do so in the next decades to come and to collectively not only see but shape how technology will transform our global legal industry as a whole. That being said, we like to end with the closing remarks of Susskind: “the best way to predict the future is to invent it!”
About the Author:
Zoë Andreae is a young entrepreneur in the legal tech space, having taken over the family’s legal software business LECARE in Hamburg at the age of 23. In between her business studies at EBS University, ESADE Business School, the London School of Economics and St. Gallen University, she gained international work experience in venture capital, global venture development, digital and strategy consulting all over the world. Besides her current role as CEO, she actively engages in devising innovative and competitive strategies for her software company by taking courses such as Disruptive Strategy at the Harvard Business School and by enrolling in the one-year Stanford Graduate School of Business LEAD Certificate Program in Corporate Innovation. In 2018, Ms. Zoë Andreae was named Woman of Legal Tech 2018, for her pioneering Master Thesis on Legal Tech Startups and their Role in the Digital Transformation of the German Legal Industry and her efforts in advancing the legal tech scene in Europe. Ms. Zoë Andreae is a founding member of the Hamburg chapter of the Legal Hackers and is a member of the supervisory board of the Liquid Legal Institute e.V.
This piece was contributed as part of the 2019 Harvard Legal Technology Symposium organized by the Harvard Law & Technology Society. The Symposium was the largest student organized legal technology event in the world. It brought together an interdisciplinary and international community to think deeply about how technology can improve and shape the law.