These are slides from my presentation at the Law Firm Leaders Forum in New York, Nov. 6-7, 2014. Part I covers Substantive Hints of Change: Innovative Technology Popping Up and Part II covers Legal Design: Structured Innovation Process and Focus on Client/User Needs.

1. INNOVATION AND EMERGING
TECHNOLOGY
COPYRIGHT © 2014, RON DOLIN
1
Ron Dolin, J.D., Ph.D.
Research Fellow
Center on the Legal Profession
Stanford Law School
Law Firm Leaders Forum
New York, Nov. 6-7, 2014

2. PART 1
Substantive Hints of
Change:
Innovative Technology
Popping Up
COPYRIGHT © 2014, RON DOLIN 2

3. FIDELITY: ESTATE PLANNING
PILOT
 Go-to place for retirement planning
 Marketplace between clients and lawyers
 Company reputation at stake
 How to use, pass information?
 How to set pricing?
 How to guarantee quality?
COPYRIGHT © 2014, RON DOLIN 3

4. LEGALZOOM ENTERS SAM'S
CLUB
 Avoids UPL with lawyer review
 Competing against non-consumption
 Minimal (but existent) quality requirements
 Moving up-market with low margin model
 Increasing corporate work
COPYRIGHT © 2014, RON DOLIN 4

5. STARTUPS AND ABS'S
 AFA all around
 Improved value: quality up, costs down
 Riverview, Everlaw, Novus Law, Ravel, Modria,
Lex Machina, etc.
 Legal services without law firm constraints
 Focus on client needs and design process
COPYRIGHT © 2014, RON DOLIN 5

6. CORPORATE CLIENTS
 Google wants to measure ROI on legal spend by
measuring law firm value (e.g. quality); 500
attorneys with 40 engineers.
 Cisco at 80% flat fee with standard business
metrics (performance) – not law firm metrics.
 Fad or movement?
(“Inc.” magazine article once said that the web was
a fad and compared it to CB radios.)
COPYRIGHT © 2014, RON DOLIN 6

7. OPTIMIZING PRODUCT
PURCHASING*
* innovias.com
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8. OPTIMIZING SERVICE
PURCHASING*
* innovias.com
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9. IN GENERAL (E.G. LEGAL)*
* interactioneurope.com
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10. Row 1 Row 2 Row 3 Row 4
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12
10
8
6
4
2
0
Column 1
Column 2
Column 3
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
1
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
E-discovery Quality
(hypothetical)
Relative Cost
Precision * Recall

11. PART 2
COPYRIGHT © 2014, RON DOLIN 11
Legal Design:
Structured Innovation
Process
Focus on Client/User
Needs

12. INNOVATOR'S
DILEMMA/SOLUTION*
 Threats and opportunities
 Sustaining innovation – efficiency
 Disruptive innovation – new markets
 Non-consumption – simple requirements
 Unknown and unknowable markets
* Christensen/Raynor
COPYRIGHT © 2014, RON DOLIN 12

13. LAW FIRM INNOVATION
 Compare marketing (2-3%) with innovation
budget.
 Measuring ROI on marketing (which focuses
on current offerings)?
 Propose: 1% on innovation.
 Focus: pilots and business models,
not large-scale software development.
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14. TECHNOLOGY REQUIRES
INTEGRATION
 Seyfarth – client-focused
engineering team
 Fenwick – doc automation startup
pipeline
 New business opportunities?
 Law firm API (micro-questions)?
 Automated contract analysis
(text analysis)?
 Alternate settlement models
(big-data)? COPYRIGHT © 2014, RON DOLIN 14

15. INNOVATION PROCESS
 Independent team, dedicated
budget
 Discovery-based planning, not
stage-gates
 Identify assumptions, test early,
repeat
 Budget must include learning
through trial-and-error
COPYRIGHT © 2014, RON DOLIN 15

16. LEGAL DESIGN PROCESS
 Stanford's d.school – dschool.stanford.edu
(Margaret Hagan)
 Structured: empathy, ideation, testing, etc.
 Applied to the legal system generally (estate
planning, immigration, patent system...)
 Applicable to law firms
COPYRIGHT © 2014, RON DOLIN 16

17. CONCLUSION
 Design work is simply a structured
approach to discovering and solving
(client) needs
 The design process is being applied
across the legal system, including
(some) law firms and their new
competitors
 The challenge is not how to incorporate
technology – it's how to incentivize
innovative behavior
COPYRIGHT © 2014, RON DOLIN 17

18. COPYRIGHT © 2014, RON DOLIN 18
Ron.A.Dolin@radicalconcepts.com
@legalnoise
radicalconcepts.com; legaltechdesign.com