I want to talk about a tough topic today Well, really, it is more of a question: Can we help our clients Do Less

Law? Can we deliver value to clients not just with efficiency, but with prevention and doing less? Let me spend a minute setting up why it's important that we ask that question

Clients - and here I mean general counsels of big companies Face pressure today Company lawyers were once immune from corporate cost-cutting pressure No More So GCs are moving work from firms to their own in-house lawyers This has big impact on law firms

2008 saw an sea change Secular shift from growth to flat demand That shift has given buyers - the small and big companies that retain BigLaw - market power But for the GC, this flattening is not enough What else can they do?

Big companies must consider ways to do less law So far, the GC has equated value with efficiency Efficiency is great - but only part of the solution Doing less and preventing is better than being more efficient But is that really possible?

The data say YES - we can do less Researchers studied legal costs across developed countries Like in healthcare, the data found that The US legal system costs a lot more than the Eurozone average It's not clear, though, what we get for it

Prevention is one way to do less I think we can do more legal prevention I fear market does NOT value prevention When I searched "preventive law" (and "Preventative Law") Surprised how few hits Just 63k

It gets worse No jobs on LinkedIn mention preventive law With clients driving for value, this is quite a surprise Maybe we can invent this position What might it look like to do preventive law? But first, is there money in it?

The chart shows tablet sales overtaking PCs New things hurt entrenched players but enrich others Apple and Samsung revenue soars While HP and Dell plummets Doing less law may seem scary Like other shifts, it will create losers and winners

We can do less with efficiency or effectiveness I'll show examples soon To really do less, though, we must overcome 2 barriers First, clients more care about cost, not just about outcomes Not clear they are there yet And second, there may be an even more fundamental barrier

I call the 2nd barrier the law of too many words Look at the really long quotes over the entrance of Berkley Law school Subliminal desire for lawyers to say / do more than they need to We have techniques to do less law But do we have the will?

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For those with the will... There are many enabling technologies - and products - for legal efficiency Some, like KM and D/A, have been around for a while Others, like LPM, are newer and rising rapidly Old or new, uptake is limited, so still plenty of room to improve

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Transformative technologies go further They let us do less law I show a few examples here So far, predictive coding to accelerate document review has the best uptake The others, which crystallize legal know-how in software, face slow adoption But such transformative tech offers much opportunity

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I'll now spend one minute looking at 3 other transformative ways to do less Decision analysis lets us do less in litigation It does 2 big things Helps align a team around assumptions and case logic And shows the value of settling, which can lead to earlier settlements and lower legal costs

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Open source law would help lawyers stop re-inventing the wheel Software developers long ago learned the value of open source code Where are the lawyers? In a few markets, the players have created open source law Perhaps we need entrepreneurs here to create more legal examples!

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We hear a lot about big data Can we do more prevention and less law with big data analytics? Here is one example - arriving at settlements faster We need smart people to figure out how to analyze corporate big data to do less law I expect many more examples in the future

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To create these examples we need R&D The cross industry average in the US is about 5% Law firms generally invest little Clients invest even less Companies willing to invest may have great potential to profit

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Of course, R&D must translate to jobs We see here today that there are jobs in companies developing tech The open question remains Will more than a handful of few firms and companies invest to do this? It's been slow but pressure continues to build

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Change, even incremental change, is hard for anyone Lawyers are even worse - they love precedent But the pressure to reduce cost and increase value is real It's early days still So that means individual and institutional opportunities abound.. To do less law

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