Moving toward a better profession, one conference at a time

12
Feb
2014

Nicole Black

Are law firms big and small appropriately acclimating to the rapidly changing legal landscape or are they simply employing stop gap measures to make ends meet? Last month, the authors of an annual report on the U.S. legal profession attempted to glean the answer to that tricky ques-tion.  And two New York City legal conferences also provided interesting insight on this topic as well.

First, there was the Report on the State of the Legal Market, co-produced by Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor and Georgetown Law School's Center for the Study of the Legal Profession. At the outset of the report the following paradox was noted: although the top 350 largest U.S. law firms grew by only 1.1% in 2012 (compared to 1.7% in 2011), and about 40% of law firms on the NLJ's top 350 list actually shrank in size, 2013 was a record year for law firm mergers and lat-eral acquisitions.

The authors noted that bigger isn't always better-especially when it comes to law firms. In-stead, they recommended that law firm leaders must address the concerns of clients and pro-vide “more efficient, predictable, and cost effective legal services…(by focusing) their attention on re-thinking the basic organizational, pricing, and service delivery models that have dominated the market for the past several decades.” They then concluded that for most firms “the goal should not be to 'build a bigger boat' but rather a better one.”

Great advice, but will law firms follow it in 2014? Based on the observations of attendees from two dueling legal conferences, Legaltech and ReinventLaw, in New York City last week, the short answer seems to be the always-popular lawyerly reply “it depends.”

First, there was Legaltech, a conference traditionally targeted toward BigLaw. In recent years, some have suggested that the conference should be re-named the “eDiscovery conference” and, based on my experience, that was certainly the case this year since the focus of the event trended more toward eDiscovery in 2014 more so than any other year that I can recall. Session topics were primarily geared toward “big data,' “eDiscovery,” and “information governance,” as shown by this word cloud compiled from session titles by InsideLegal.

So at Legaltech, the primary focus was not on innovation or meeting market demands by re-envisioning the delivery of legal services. Instead, it was all about coping with information over-load by assisting BigLaw in sifting through, sorting, and classifying data-lots and lots of data. So although legal technology is the premise of this conference, helping lawyers under-stand how to use it to meet the changing demands of 21st century legal consumers was not a large part of the “official” discussion at Legaltech. But those discussions were occurring none-theless-not in the conference sessions but in the hallways, at group dinners, and at other events surrounding the conference. 

This same phenomenon occurred at ReinventLaw, which occurred on February 7th, the day af-ter Legaltech ended. This conference is targeted at all lawyers, from solos to BigLaw, who are interested in “new innovations in the legal services industry (and beyond) and network(ing) with thought leaders and others interested in the next generation of law practice.”

While I did not attend the conference, Bob Ambrogi summed hit up as follows: “(T)he speakers were a mixed bag. Some did little more than hawk their own products. Some presented Big New Thing ideas that, frankly, I've seen and heard before in my 20 years of covering this stuff. Some were truly inspiring and clearly blazing trails into new and promising directions. I might argue that it was in the conversations in the halls outside the sessions where the most valuable ideas were being exchanged and connections being made.”

In other words, both conferences served a very important purpose. By focusing on legal technology and innovation and thus precipitating the convergence of people interested in those concepts, forward thinking discussions were had amongst those most interested in changing our profession for the better.

Even so, the question remains:  will our profession rise to the occasion and meet the demands of 21st century legal consumers who expect better client  service and more bang for their buck? The answer remains to be seen, but the good news is that all signs point to evidence that the legal profession is evolving. It may not be happening as quickly as some of us would like, but slowly and surely, we're working together to create a better profession-one survey and one conference at a time.