By Susan Letterman White
Technology and the Disruption of Organizational Structures, Leadership & Management, and Talent Development & Evaluation
Technology will continue to change our workplace, as it has always done. It connects people with each other and new ideas that otherwise would remain separated by vast amounts of space and/or time, while paradoxically diminishing the quality and quantity of contact between people physically near to each other. Technology has eliminated opportunities while creating new ones. In short, technology has created options for new structures to change who can work together, new processes for how they can work together, and new product and service outcomes as a result of what they do. Many of these changes present growth opportunities for different elements of the legal industry from law schools to law departments, law firms, and individual lawyers.
Many leaders of professional service organizations look at technology as a disruptive threat to manage instead of an opportunity to leverage for a unique, competitive advantage. The fact that it is now possible to work together across vast expanses of space and time make mega-firms possible. The challenge is leading and managing those firms so that the organization, as an entity, is sustainable.
Indeed, this very challenge is present in much smaller firms, too. In the legal industry, repeated efforts to protect a marketplace position, flow from an argument to protect the public. The argument’s construct is that providing advice and drafting documents is a role reserved for the few people, who have received a certain level of education, experience, and expertise that is difficult to duplicate or automate. This defensive position requires significant resources and has been limited in the past and additional limitations will arise in the future. The effort put into creating and enforcing laws to protect the public from the unauthorized practice of law could have gone elsewhere.
If the legal industry leaders had been looking for the opportunities associated with change as the Accounting profession moved from the European to the US marketplace, they might have been looking for way to eliminate prohibitions against lawyers and non-lawyers sharing work instead of foolishly trying to prevent the amplifying wave from hitting the shore. They were right to worry about the loss of work to Tax and Trusts & Estates attorneys; however, their response was mistaken and detrimental. Law schools could have developed courses, if not degrees, for aspiring accountants and the lawyers who would share work with them.
Presently, law schools are missing the opportunity to create degree tracts in regulatory affairs , and law firms are missing the opportunity to provide a lower-cost service, despite the fact that Biotech, Pharmaceutical, and Medical Device industry leaders must have been complaining to their lawyers about the growth of an overwhelming amount of compliance paperwork. In the universities that see the opportunity, the tract is not housed in the law school. In another example, using the old argument that a lawyer, who is too closely connected to a non-lawyer in business can’t be trusted to maintain the independent judgment necessary to represent clients, the ABA has blocked alternate business structures that would allow the existence of publicly-held law firms, eliminate compensation policies that creates too much vulnerability to the organization with too much power in a few individuals, and provide funding to invest in more technology. Unfortunately, the lawyer mindset for change is to see risk and try to eliminate it, while the business mindset is to find the opportunity and leverage it. Finally, who isn’t familiar with Legal Zoom, which has productized many of the services, previously within a lawyer’s offerings and considered too creative for commodity packaging, and reduced the cost to consumers.
Every one of the examples in the paragraph above begs organization leaders to consider their business model. Combined with the next wave of changes, aimed at automating high-level management, leaders ought to feel the nudge to consider their talent management and development models, too. Developing and deepening relationships with clients and referral sources has become much more important as client loyalty (or dependency) has diminished. Leadership and management have risen in importance and the tasks and competencies defining both continue to change. Finally, it’s critical to consider the criteria by which talent – at the leadership and subordinate levels – is evaluated and consider options for change.
The next stage of technology is aimed at automating high-level management and the law firms that remain competitive will consider adjustments to their organizational structure and what it means to be a lawyer, manager, and leader. Research, document drafting, marketing and business development, and invoicing and collecting fees are processes that have been transformed by technology. These transformations raised the importance of project management processes and skills.
Enter iCEO, a virtual project manager for knowledge-based products. It’s only in Beta; however, in addition to being able to take a complex knowledge-based task and break it down into smaller individual tasks, it is also capable of assigning discrete tasks to knowledge-workers anywhere in the world by using multiple, already existing, software platforms. The latter platforms shake up the notion of a traditional workforce even more than do contract attorneys or moving functional divisions, like HR or finance to back offices located in cheaper real estate markets hundreds of miles from the front office spaces, which has been happening at least since 2001.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, oDesk and Elance match requests for discrete tasks with workers, who will complete the tasks. Mechanical Turk is essentially a 24/7 virtual workforce. The platform matches human intelligence workers with thousands of different tasks listed by requestors. When I reviewed the site for this article, one task was described as reviewing the work previously done to extract and verify information contained in a legal document. oDesk is a site for matching any job that can be done on a computer, from writing a blog to developing software, to the right individual, team, or technology tool. Elance lists categories of freelancers in several areas, including legal, marketing & sales, finance & management, office administration, and writing as well as web development.
iCEO is managed by a person using a dashboard system to assign tasks , which allows the creation of drag and drop assembly lines for the production of a complex end product- for example, a 124-page research report for a Fortune 50 company. IFTF, the non-profit that created the prototype software ran that experiment. Project management required a single skill, knowing how to use the iCEO software. The discrete tasks that went into the creation of the written report, including images and graphs, were routed across 23 people all over the world. The reduction in time from months to weeks and presumably cost were profound. It isn’t a huge leap from creating this type of research report to creating a legal memorandum on the current state of law on any issue. Law firms and legal departments are already creating proprietary databases with contract clauses from various types of contracts. Perhaps vendors are too. Imagine the options.
Questions to ask and Ideas to Consider
Here’s the paradox: How can you design a sustainable and tightly-held-together organization and give individuals the independence they want and need?
Organizational Structures
Marina Gorbis, Executive Director of The Institute for the Future, suggests designing the organization to support individual initiative instead of managing to rigidly mold behavior and an expansive organizational network of relationships. Measure an individual’s performance by internal contributions to the business model and the person’s connections and standing in external communities that are important to the business model. Instead of organizing that is driven by a linear hierarchy, consider an organizational design driven by networks of projects and other relationship-drivers.
Structures, or how people are organized and connected and their actions influenced by others, include tangible structures, like office buildings and the arrangement of walls and intangible structures, like formal hierarchies, divisions, and teams, and the informal networks of friends and acquaintances. Places resembling offices, the corporate structure for the storage and flow of information, followed the invention of writing and the need to keep records and for people working on related projects to communicate, for example, banking in 14th Century Florence. The corporate organizational structure, created in the 18th century for the purpose of an efficient workplace, began changing in the 1960s with the advent creative professionals, who were paid to think.
Management and Professional Development Processes
The project management function is obviously changing right now, even though most law firms barely have been introduced to current project management skills and best practices. So, too, should be attorney development, as is professional development in other industries. The argument that the legal, management, and professional development functions require too much creativity to allow for automation is being eroded and the erosion will continue. As people become more accustomed to receiving services coordinated with the assistance of technology, the benefits of reduced time and cost for technology driven management and professional development will grow.
Law firms can choose to outsource to companies and individuals routine unskilled tasks like handling mail, reception, or photocopying duties or skilled tasks, like legal research and writing. Project management skills and training are the focus of professional development to leverage new technology opportunities and save time. Management, as a task and skill, has risen in importance and is about to fall in importance just as quickly. Traditional organization structures are becoming less and less important as a new generation of alternative technologies comes into existence.
