Yesterday afternoon, the Vialegis event on “the Future of the Legal Market” (with the support of the Institute of company lawyers and the Bar organisations) drew a huge crowd of 320 attendees, filling all the seats at the beautifully renovated “Chancellery auditorium” of BNP Paribas Fortis.
The excitement at the start of the event was palpable, as Vialegis CEO Philippe Jadoul and his team could present a panel of inspiring speakers: Prof. Richard Susskind OBE, Wim Dejonghe (worldwide managing partner of Allen & Overy) and Pieter Gunst (lawyer and co-founder of LawGives). Justice Minister Koen Geens was set to make the closing remarks.
As it was actually the first time that Prof. Susskind made an appearance for a speaking engagement in Belgium, many a (managing) partner or general counsel in the audience could be seen clutching note paper and pen.
After a brief introduction by a visibly proud Philippe Jadoul, Prof. Susskind took the floor for a very-well delivered speech that often had a sobering effect on the audience. Indeed, drawing from his research and his consulting work, he confronted us with some hard truths about the traditional operating model of the law firm, which, in view of the technological developments, will continue to erode at an ever faster pace. He made a compelling case for immediate action by law firms, which should focus on embracing the technology and tools that are allowing the division of legal work so that it can be executed in more efficient ways. He also illustrated with some telling examples that, when it comes to client loyalty, law firms are banking too much on trust as a differentiating element.
Wim Dejonghe, who, as Global Managing Partner, has been leading the worldwide organization of Allen & Overy since 2008, was the perfect follow-up speaker to Prof. Susskind. His presentation showed how A&O has evolved and looked like a textbook case study of what Prof. Susskind had argued just before.
Wim took us trough the process A&O followed in order to develop its present, multi-prong business model. A&O conducted a comprehensive survey on what clients felt were the important trends in delivery of legal services. After the survey, the road ahead became clear: A&O would have to decompose its client work and reorganize it in a way that would be more efficient (time and cost) and able to compete with the new types of providers (e.g. document review, managed legal services, online automated legal services, contract lawyers, legal consulting). This approach has now been rolled out and has positioned A&O as a provider of hybrid legal solutions for the clients. Clients have responded very favourably and turnover from these ‘new’ business lines is growing impressively.
Finally, Pieter Gunst, co-founder of LawGives, demonstrated how his company, dubbed the “Über of the legal profession” has harnessed the power of legal networks to provide an intelligent platform where anyone seeking legal advice can connect with the lawyer who seems best suited to help. Pieter explained how, through the development of self-learning algorithms and data analysis, LawGives is continuously improving its capabilities to match the proper lawyer with LawGives users. He showed how LawGives is also quite successful in dealing with the subjective and qualitative element in the choice of a lawyer (perceived quality, trust) through statistical analysis of the huge quantities of data that is generated by the interactions on the LawGives platform.
There was a flurry of questions during the Q&A session but Prof. Susskind observed astutely that most of the questions seemed defensive in nature (e.g. questions on issues of legal privilege, confidentiality and trust in view of commoditisation, online legal services, etc.) and that it illustrated how difficult it is for lawyers to look at the (disruptive) developments in view of turning them into their favour.
Minister Koen Geens, undoubtedly the hardest (net)working minister of the moment, then took the floor for the closing remarks. Starting from an example of the European Court of Justice, where routine cases are now almost entirely handled via an IT-based document management process, which only requires marginal review by a judge, he argued that the legal profession can and must change it’s attitudes towards commoditization and automation, to the benefit of the clients. On a public policy level, he underlined that, as illustrated by many an example of technology that already exist today, these developments should also lead to a better and cheaper access to the justice system for small enterprises and private citizens. But it is clear that this will dramatically transform the legal profession.
After these closing remarks, Philippe Jadoul invited everyone to the reception. Unfortunately, the LexGO reporter had to leave to catch a train, in order to make it to another appointment, so he missed out on the socializing at the reception. But if past experience at other Vialegis events counts for anything, then he confidently reports ‘in absentia’ that it was excellent!
