Law new refers to the legal industry’s pursuit of change that produces impact for legal consumers and society at large. The concept is a broad one and encompasses everything from changing the way a law firm practices to how a company integrates its legal function. It can also refer to a new practice area such as data or cybersecurity.
The goal of law new is to make more legal help available and more accessible in ways that are cost efficient, innovative, and responsive. This means not only leveraging technology, but also embracing process and working in an increasingly collaborative manner with clients and other stakeholders. This also means finding new sources of revenue and exploring non-traditional fee structures.
For example, law firms and other providers are rethinking the traditional billable hour model and moving to flat fees or value billing. Some firms are also creating new legal products that are simpler, more focused, and quicker to complete. These include self-help tools, alternative fee arrangements, and integrated services models.
Other providers are focusing on innovation, collaboration, and customer-centricity. For example, companies are partnering with law firms to offer on-demand legal assistance through a variety of channels. In addition, they are developing integrated services to manage legal risk and compliance for business operations.
These trends are driving new legal service offerings and a more fluid, collaborative, and customer-centric approach to delivery. They are eroding artificial, lawyer-created distinctions between provider sources and creating a legal supply chain that resembles the businesses and societies it serves.
A new generation of legal professionals are entering the workforce with a different perspective on how law should be practiced. They view the profession as an industry that should be constantly evolving and innovating in order to meet the needs of a fast-changing world. They believe that it is a noble calling to protect and advance the rights of individuals, families, and businesses and to provide justice for all.
In addition, law schools are training graduates to be problem solvers rather than simply practitioners of the law. This includes training in the skills of design thinking, agile project management, and other methodologies to allow them to be more flexible in their work and to better understand the needs of their clients and other stakeholders.
Lastly, the legal industry is integrating through horizontal and vertical integration, joint ventures, and managed services. Large law firms and in-house legal departments are pursuing integration that leverages infrastructure, pools resources, shares data, enables broader access to expertise and information, reduces cost, eliminates redundancies, and meets growing cost takeout targets. The new law will possess data agility; it will master its prime value elements of capture, unification, applied human and artificial intelligence, visualization, real-time refresh, decision driving, and global business integration. It will have a diverse, multidisciplinary, tech and data-proficient, collaborative, and empathetic workforce. It will deliver legal services at the speed of business and society. It will be the antidote to a legacy economic model that is unnecessarily inefficient and skewed by internal pressures.