The concept of “law new” is a catchall industry term that encompasses legal tech, “legal ops,” and ALSP’s. But it also refers to a different way of thinking about law, including focusing on clients and embracing technology. It’s often described as fresh icing on top of a stale cake, and it will help the legal industry become more efficient in the future.
In short, new law means using innovation to produce change that better serves legal consumers and society at large. That change will be achieved through a holistically diverse and customer-centric workforce that embraces collaboration, flexibility, transparency, scalability and solution-based delivery. It will also focus on delivering value by measuring output and net promoter scores rather than adherence to legacy business models that yield profits from in-put alone.
New law will also incorporate a fluid and integrated delivery model that fuses the legal supply chain, erasing artificial, lawyer-created distinctions between provider sources. This will enable an agile, fluid, and on-demand workforce that is scalable based on proven, verifiable expertise and experience, not artificially limited by traditional partnership structures, billing rates, or hourly rates. It will be driven by the need to deliver value to meet the accelerating pace of business and societal change.
As a result, the legal profession will evolve into an integrated legal environment that more closely resembles its customers and society at large. It will have a diversity of cognitively, demographically, and culturally diverse individuals with creative, techno-proficient, customer-centric, and empathetic skills. It will work in teams across functions, enterprises, and industries to solve accelerating challenges and capture opportunities that cannot be mastered by a single function, enterprise, or industry-at-large.
New law will be shaped by two principal sources: (1) large-scale legal buyer activism; and (2) corporate Goliaths that have the brand, capital, know-how, customer-centricity, data mastery, tech platforms, agile, multidisciplinary workforces, and footprint in/familiarity with the legal industry. These companies will reshape the industry and provide the market with an alternative to expensive, inefficient and antiquated law firms. Their arrival is a long overdue reality that will bring law into alignment with the broader business, economy, and society. It will also introduce a level of innovation that will redefine and expand legal services, enabling the sector to compete on customer impact and enhanced experience. A more innovative legal environment will be a game-changer for both legacy and emerging providers, as well as for the industries and communities it serves.
