Legal Mosaic Essays on Legal Delivery

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<strong>Legal</strong> <strong>Mosaic</strong>: <strong>Essays</strong> on <strong>Legal</strong> Delivery ple of Picasso’s late Cubist style. In Cubism, the subject of the artwork is transformed into a sequence of planes, lines, and arcs. Cubism has been described as an intellectual style because the artists analyzed the shapes of their subjects and reinvented them on the canvas. The viewer is left to reconstruct the subject and space of the work by comparing the different shapes and forms to determine what each one represents. Through this process, the viewer participates with the artist in making the artwork make sense .It is for the audience to cobble together the multitude of seemingly disparate images and elements to represent the subject in a greater context. This appears to be the approach that many legal pundits are taking to the way they paint the current legal landscape; they translate the once monolithic legal topography—one where a law firm “handles the case” start to finish (including back office functions)—into a cubist rendering that identifies and isolates different parts of the process that now include additional providers outside the firm. Each provider in the supply chain is analyzed exhaustively, but the viewer—as with the cubist painters-- is left to make sense of these seemingly disparate actors in the supply chain and, more particularly, how they mesh. Let’s start with a term that has come to frame the discussion of the legal industry: Unbundling Unbundling is a neologism initially used to describe how the ubiquity of mobile devices, Internet connectivity, consumer web technologies, social media and information access in the 21st century are affecting older institutions such as education, broadcasting, newspapers, games, shopping, etc. These new devices break up the packages (think: law firm “handles the case”), replacing them with particular parts at a scale and cost unmatchable by the old order. Unbundling has been called “the great disruptor”. 8
<strong>Legal</strong> <strong>Mosaic</strong>: <strong>Essays</strong> on <strong>Legal</strong> Delivery Unbundling has accelerated in the legal marketplace. Staffing companies were early entrants into the process, followed by legal process outsourcers (“LPO’s”), and a stream of legal service providers (not all of whom are lawyers) who took on pieces of “legal work” (query: was it all really “legal” work in the first place?) and did so at a fraction of the price of what law firms charged for those same tasks. Today, the list of legal suppliers (“unbundlers”) has grown in breadth and depth, transforming procurement of legal services as well as the legal delivery process. Here is a partial list of legal supply chain players: ■ LPO’s ■ Staffing Companies ■ <strong>Legal</strong> document companies ■ <strong>Legal</strong> Technology providers ■ E-Discovery companies ■ “alternative providers” ■ “secondary brands” Like the cubists, each of these players in the legal landscape has been analyzed exhaustively, usually with an emphasis on current or prospective revenue. But what is needed is a holistic view of all the providers and a paradigm for how and when they can be utilized in a risk and cost appropriate manner. Even more important is: who will manage the process and by what means—human and technological—will it be achieved? In other words: who will integrate the legal supply chain and how? Integration Integration (from the Latin integer, meaning whole or entire) means combining parts so that they work together or form a whole. In the legal context, this means uniting the daisy chain of legal service providers and integrating them via technology, project management, and legal expertise. This requires us to go beyond the cubist rendering of the legal landscape and to engage in a very different rendering of it. It is 9
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