To say the legal profession is facing disruption is, well, to state the obvious. There are, of course, the pressures created by COVID-19 and resulting health and safety restrictions, which have pushed firms, often suddenly, into fully remote practices and placed increased emphasis on cost reduction and cash conservation.
Simultaneously, courts and bar associations are beginning to reimagine how the legal industry works. The California State Bar Association’s “regulatory sandbox” initiative, for example, looks to experiment with the delivery of legal services. Utah’s proposed regulatory reform task force will investigate loosened restrictions around lawyer advertising, fee sharing, and non-lawyer firm ownership.
But there are also disruptive trends that have been in place for years—many of which first emerged during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 and which are rapidly accelerating in the current climate: an increased demand for technological competency; a continued decline in realization rates and growth in write-offs that leaves billions of dollars uncollected every year; unrelenting client pressures, particularly from large corporate clients, to reduce the time, risk, and cost of more commodifiable legal work, or to in-house that work altogether.
Bit by bit, these changes have been reshaping an industry. Add the accelerants of a dual economic and health crisis and suddenly the future is here. Indeed, it’s ten years early.
Logikcull’s CEO and co-founder Andy Wilson recently sat down with Jack Newton, CEO and co-founder of the cloud-based practice management software Clio, to discuss just what the future (and present) of legal work holds, as part of Clio’s “Daily Matters” podcast.
As Wilson knows, shifts in technology and market demands can rapidly change how legal services are delivered. Indeed, Logikcull as it is known today emerged from the last great economic crisis, the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009. Back then, Logikcull was Logik Systems, Inc. Founded in 2004, Logik was a brick-and-mortar, DC-based legal services company, specializing in data processing for some of the highest-profile litigation in the nation. But after years as successfully operating as a vendor—and being named as one of the fastest-growing companies in the world—the company realized that the days of manual data processing, opaque fee agreements, and overly complex technology were limited. Logik was reborn as Logikcull in 2013, with the goal of bringing powerful simplicity to eDiscovery.
Newton, too, has witnessed rapid evolution in the legal industry. Founded in 2007, Clio was one of the first companies to offer a cloud-based approach to practice management. In the years that have followed, the company has grown from a single customer to over 150,000 and recently closed a $250 million funding round, making it the largest VC-backed company in Canada.
So, where do these two legal industry innovators see the industry headed?
Listen to the podcast below to find out. Highlights include:
- Advice for legal professionals working remotely and tips on how (and why) to embrace a distributed model not just for office space, but for previously centralized tasks such as eDiscovery
- How the current economic and health crises are forcing the legal industry to jump ten years ahead in technological adoption
- Why technological competence is a must-have for all legal professionals
