In the wake of COVID-19, the legal industry has grappled with many of the same challenges faced by other industries, like adjusting to remote work and becoming comfortable with new technologies. But what comes next for the future of law is less clear. How will the COVID crisis impact the legal economy, who will win legal work, and where will we see success in the legal profession? In the first episode of The Advisory Board, Casetext CEO Jake Heller’s new live series on the business challenges in legal, leaders from in-house, law firms, and legal tech got together to explore these questions.
As the GC of an insurance company, Trevor Uffleman revealed that economic pressures on legal professionals like him are already leading to pressure to cut costs on legal spend. For Trevor, that means identifying the law firms they get the best value from and consolidating their legal work into those firms. “Where we might’ve done business with 15 or 20 firms 3 years ago, we’re finding which ones really meet our needs competitively,” he says. Trevor also believes that this increasingly competitive environment will also provide opportunities to push for alternative fee arrangements.
Nicole Auerbach has been a major force in popularizing alternative fee arrangements. When she started her own law firm in 2008 after 15 years in big law, this was much less common, but she’s seeing it become increasingly popular as market demand increases. She expects the COVID crisis to be the wake up call other firms need to consider offering AFAs: “The question,” she says, “is how radical are people going to be willing to be?”
Ralph Baxter foresees a shift in law firms driven by clients like Trevor and competition like Nicole, the co-founder of new model law firm ElevateNext. “Competition drives change. The more the buyer is insistent on the kinds of things Trevor already has said, and the more Nicole and others create better mousetraps, the faster the law firms will change,” Ralph says. He sees law firms’ ability to quickly respond to the quickly-shifting landscape, with many firms already transitioned to fully-remote practices, as a positive sign that law firms will be willing and able to learn how to operate differently in response to COVID-19.
For Jake Heller, CEO of Casetext, another optimistic sign for the future of law is the potential for the economic conditions in the legal economy to drive innovation. He describes a “mini-explosion” of legal tech companies that resulted from the 2008 financial crisis, with increasing numbers of attorneys shifting focus away from traditional roles for legal practitioners and toward innovation-focused roles, like the growth of e-discovery, or innovative business models, like Nicole’s.
Law firms’ ability to innovate in order to adapt to the needs of their clients across legal practice areas, whether through new business models or new technology, will be critical to determining who wins legal work after COVID-19 — and given the importance of the legal profession, it may also be critical to our overall economic recovery. For more of Trevor, Nicole, Ralph, and Jake’s predictions for how the legal profession will react to COVID-19, watch episode 1 of The Advisory Board.
Want to know more about what the experts think about the biggest business challenges in the legal industry? Tune in to The Advisory Board, live on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Join us for Episode 2 on 5/28 for a look at how venture capital and law firms are approaching investments in legal tech in the wake of COVID-19, from funding start ups to purchasing new tools.
Rapidly draft common legal letters and emails.
How this skill works
Specify the recipient, topic, and tone of the correspondence you want.
CoCounsel will produce a draft.
Chat back and forth with CoCounsel to edit the draft.
Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.
How this skill works
Enter a question or issue, along with relevant facts such as jurisdiction, area of law, etc.
CoCounsel will retrieve relevant legal resources and provide an answer with explanation and supporting sources.
Behind the scenes, Conduct Research generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identify the on-point case law, statutes, and regulations, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), along with the supporting sources and applicable excerpts.
Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.
How this skill works
Enter a question or issue, along with relevant facts such as jurisdiction, area of law, etc.
CoCounsel will retrieve relevant legal resources and provide an answer with explanation and supporting sources.
Behind the scenes, Conduct Research generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identify the on-point case law, statutes, and regulations, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), along with the supporting sources and applicable excerpts.
Get a thorough deposition outline in no time, just by describing the deponent and what’s at issue.
How this skill works
Describe the deponent and what’s at issue in the case, and CoCounsel identifies multiple highly relevant topics to address in the deposition and drafts questions for each topic.
Refine topics by including specific areas of interest and get a thorough deposition outline.
Ask questions of contracts that are analyzed in a line-by-line review
How this skill works
Allows the user to upload a set of contracts and a set of questions
This skill will provide an answer to those questions for each contract, or, if the question is not relevant to the contract, provide that information as well
Upload up to 10 contracts at once
Ask up to 10 questions of each contract
Relevant results will hyperlink to identified passages in the corresponding contract
Get a list of all parts of a set of contracts that don’t comply with a set of policies.
How this skill works
Upload a set of contracts and then describe a policy or set of policies that the contracts should comply with, e.g. "contracts must contain a right to injunctive relief, not merely the right to seek injunctive relief."
CoCounsel will review your contracts and identify any contractual clauses relevant to the policy or policies you specified.
If there is any conflict between a contractual clause and a policy you described, CoCounsel will recommend a revised clause that complies with the relevant policy. It will also identify the risks presented by a clause that does not conform to the policy you described.
Get an overview of any document in straightforward, everyday language.
How this skill works
Upload a document–e.g. a legal memorandum, judicial opinion, or contract.
CoCounsel will summarize the document using everyday terminology.
Find all instances of relevant information in a database of documents.
How this skill works
Select a database and describe what you're looking for in detail, such as templates and precedents to use as a starting point for drafting documents, or specific clauses and provisions you'd like to include in new documents you're working on.
CoCounsel identifies and delivers every instance of what you're searching for, citing sources in the database for each instance.
Behind the scenes, CoCounsel generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identifiy the on-point passages from every document in the database, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), citing applicable excerpts in specific documents.
Get a list of all parts of a set of contracts that don’t comply with a set of policies.
Ask questions of contracts that are analyzed in a line-by-line review
Get a thorough deposition outline by describing the deponent and what’s at issue.
Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.