Cisco General Counsel on the State of Technology in the Law
- Posted by Geoff Gussis on March 21st, 2007
- Filed in IT/Software/Internet
Mark Chandler, the General Counsel of Cisco, gave a speech recently that is a must-read for inhouse lawyers and those who serve them - including outside counsel who are not on the leading edge of the latest technologies:
“The legal industry has spent millions on IT to up speed access to information. But the only way I can get that information is through an individual billing me by the hour. My in-house team often has more sophistication than the associates who mine the knowledge management system to generate a memo. We’re just not allowed to access the information without paying for someone’s time.
The systems exist today to change the delivery of legal information to clients. But that change would challenge a model that today delivers high profits. Every big company, including Cisco, is using those systems to make our support services more effective, and to drive down the costs of providing service. Law firms are not. Clay Christensen of Harvard Business School has written, and I quote, “Large American law firms are just about the most profitable businesses in the world. Speedier information-gathering capabilities allow large law firms to increase utilization of less experienced lawyers without passing cost savings on to their customers.” So changing the service delivery model will be disruptive, and not just because associates are kept busy doing work that a machine might be able to do better. Changing that model will also cut into the effectiveness of cross-selling. From a client’s point of view, cross-selling is an effort of star partners to leverage the loyalty they have earned to drive hourly work to other parts of the firm. Today, there is little incentive for law firms to apply risk-reward logic to the amount of legal services provided. And General Counsel know that.
The growing scope of knowledge availability will endanger this system.”
Read the entire speech - it’s worth it and you’ll pick up a few book recommendations as well. Tip of the hat to Brock Romanek of the TheCorporateCounsel.Net blog for the link.
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March 26th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Mark makes a good point. While the Law firm focuses on building their business around maximizing revenue per matter, they forget that corporate legal departments are dealing with greater accountability for their spending and performance. This presents many challenges for CLOs to ensure that superior services are delivered in a cost effective manner. Recent BTI Consulting Group (Client Service-A-Team) survey indicates that “Fortune 1000 companies are largely dissatisfied with their law firms. Only 25.4% of corporate counsels believe their primary law firm is best at client service. ”
Corporate legal departments need capabilities to work collaboratively with internal corporate constituents and law firms to do more with less with an integrated and collaborative suite of software solutions to automate, manage and optimize all legal functions and processes across the extended enterprise. Lecorpio (www.lecorpio.com) as well as several others are working towards getting them the right tools to manage outside counsel more efficiently. With workflow based solutions and an end to end visibility across various functions such as IP, transactions, licensing, corporate governance etc, they can perform sophisticated analysis of financial, risk, market and trend metrics and communicate the value of the legal services to their internal clients.