By Anusia Gillespie
Your social channels might show a flurry of anticipation for the upcoming virtual program on February 15th with legal futurists Richard Susskind and Mark Cohen, The Evolution of Lawyers in Business. These industry giants will discuss the key factors shaping the profession in the 2020s and pose novel questions around the implications of new technologies, law tech startups, and vertical integration on the legal market, as well as spark unique ways of thinking about the evolving purpose of lawyers.
There’s another layer to this story that exists in the subtext – UnitedLex, a leading data and professional services company specializing in litigation, intellectual property, contracts, compliance, and legal operations, is hosting and moderating one of the most prestigious thought leadership conversations in legal. Historically the domain of elite law and behemoth accounting firms, this collaboration represents a significant milestone in the evolution of legal services companies and the relevance of their value proposition at the highest levels of corporate and legal leadership.
The almost twenty-year legal organization has come up in the world and, as Susskind would frame it, successfully evolved from first generation automation to second generation innovation, in which data, blended talent, digital strategies, and scale are core to the conversation. The punchline is what this means for the industry – that UnitedLex has made its move to phase four in the Clayton Christensen disruptive innovation framework.
According to Christensen, disruptive innovation is the process in which new entrants challenge incumbents through the following sequence:
1. Incumbent businesses innovate and develop their products or services in order to appeal to their most demanding and/or profitable customers, ignoring the needs of those downmarket.
2. Entrants target this ignored market segment and gain traction by meeting their needs at a reduced cost compared to what is offered by the incumbent.
3. Incumbents don’t respond to the new entrant, continuing to focus on their more profitable segments.
4. Entrants eventually move upmarket by offering solutions that appeal to the incumbent’s “mainstream” customers.
5. Once the new entrant has begun to attract the incumbent business’s mainstream customers en masse, disruption has occurred.
We are on the precipice of disruption.
The script has flipped and business leaders with law degrees, aka Chief Legal Officers and their teams, are relying on companies like UnitedLex to partner and lead through the complexity and ambiguity of modernizing a legal organization amidst unsustainable rate models, ambiguous regulatory changes, increasing complexity, surging demand, and entrenched inertia, and doing so in a way that is paced to succeed technically, culturally, and financially.
Traditional legal advice is a sliver of the mindshare of a Chief Legal Officer. As Bjarne Tellmann, General Counsel at Haleon, has described:
“I spend 10% of my day dealing with thorny legal issues, and 90% of my day figuring out how I can deliver services without putting everyone into overdrive and burning out the legal team.”
Law Company thought leadership is about the 90% - about how to deliver the best business outcomes while advancing legal’s “higher purpose” obligations to clients, the legal profession, and communities.
Register for The Evolution of Lawyers in Business to further this important discussion led by Richard Susskind and Mark Cohen on February 15th here.
Anusia Gillespie is SVP Enterprise Lead at UnitedLex.
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