Priorities for new lawyers are changing. Can the legal industry keep up? — — from law.com by Annie Datesh, Natasha Allen, and Nicole Hatcher, Atrium
As the legal field continues to move forward, it is well-primed to place greater value on technological advancements, diverse leadership, and healthy work cultures over settling for the status quo.
Excerpts:
Yet the legal industry these lawyers are joining is evolving, and now increasingly hosts a new cohort of professionals—those shaped by technology and innovation, and who value diversity, mentorship, and efficiency over homogeneous workplaces with minimal coaching and exhausted capacities.
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Amid a strengthening job market, why are jobs in a generally well-respected industry being looked over in favor of other industries? One reason could be the legal industry’s notorious lack of progressiveness. The industry’s technology landscape is one such area of slow growth; its lack of diversity is another.
The legal industry’s long-standing dismissal of technology, while slowly changing, is fairly well known. While legal technology holds enormous potential for law firms, the industry as a whole has been famously slow to adopt modern technologies or meaningfully innovate on the traditional law firm business model. Why? For smaller firms, money can be tight, and solutions can be expensive.
The good news is that the legal industry is slowly but surely becoming more receptive to the benefits of evolving its traditional approach to the business and practice of law. Legal technologies continue to offer increased efficiencies to law firms, should they elect to adopt them, and the call for diversity and other cultural improvements within firms and the legal industry more broadly is on the rise.
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Those players in the legal industry who are able to recognize prevailing industry trends now will be in the best position to act on them.
An inserted graphic from DSC:
IT laggards could lose up to $20 billion in revenue over the next 5 years, says Accenture — from zdnet.com by Larry Dignan
Accenture’s leaders see enterprise technologies as a system compared to independent fixes and bet on cloud, AI, big data analytics and IoT.
Excerpt:
Companies that fail to scale innovation may lose up to $20 billion in revenue over the next five years as enterprises thrive or dive based on information technology decisions, according to Accenture.
Accenture’s report was based on a survey of more than 8,300 companies across 20 industries and 22 countries. Accenture scored companies on technology adoption, depth of technology adoption and cultural readiness. From there, Accenture segmented companies into leaders, defined as the top 10%, and laggards, which represent the bottom 25%.
Also see:
- Digital transformation: 3 change management mistakes to avoid — from enterprisersproject.com by Peter Bendor-Samuel
The degree of change and the pace of change both pick up during a digital transformation. Don’t let these common change management mistakes trip you up
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Top eLearning Gamification Companies 2019 — from elearningindustry.com by Christopher Pappas
Excerpt:
The Top Performing eLearning Gamification Companies 2019
As community leaders, here at eLearning Industry, we have evaluated hundreds of eLearning content development companies in the past. As we are constantly on the lookout for new advancements and trends in the eLearning field that are relevant to the industry, we decided to take a very close look at outstanding providers of gamification. We have focused on prestige, influence, application of gamification tools, activity in the eLearning field, gamification innovations, and many more subcategories.
For the list of the Top eLearning Gamification Companies 2019, we chose and ranked the best gamification companies based on the following 7 criteria:
- Gamification eLearning quality
- Customer reviews
- eLearning expertise
- Niche specialization on gamification
- Gamification industry innovation
- Company’s social responsibility
- Gamification features and capabilities
From DSC:
Alexa is up to 100,000 skills. How might these types of techs be integrated into education, training, learning spaces, collaboration, other?
Celebrating 100,000 Alexa Skills -100,000 Thank Yous to You — from developer.amazon.com
From DSC:
The two postings below show the need for more collaboration and the use of teams:
The future of law and computational technologies: Two sides of the same coin — from legaltechlever.com by Daniel Linna Jr.
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
An increasing number of lawyers today work with allied professionals to improve processes, better manage projects, embrace data-driven methods, and leverage technology to improve legal services and systems. Legal-services and lawyer regulations are evolving. And basic technologies and AI are slowly making their way into the legal industry, from legal aid organizations and courts to large law firms, corporate legal departments, and governments.
If we are to realize the potential to improve society with computational technologies, law, regulation, and ethical principles must be front and center at every stage, from problem definition, design, data collection, and data cleaning to training, deployment, and monitoring and maintenance of products and systems. To achieve this, technologists and lawyers must collaborate and share a common vocabulary. Lawyers must learn about technology, and technologists must learn about law. Multidisciplinary teams with a shared commitment to law, regulation, and ethics can proactively address today’s AI challenges, and advance our collaborative problem-solving capabilities to address tomorrow’s increasingly complex problems. Lawyers and technologists must work together to create a better future for everyone.
From DSC:
As with higher education in general, we need more team-based efforts in the legal realm as well as more TrimTab Groups.
- What’s a lawyer now? Law’s shift from practice to skill — from forbes.com by Mark Cohen
Excerpts:
Why does this distinction matter? Because law—like so many industries—is undergoing a tectonic shift. It is morphing from a lawyer dominated, practice-centric, labor-intensive guild to a tech-enabled, process and data-driven, multi-disciplinary global industry. The career paths, skills, and expectations of lawyers are changing. So too are how, when, and on what financial terms they are engaged; with whom and from what delivery models they work; their performance metrics, and the resources—human and machine—they collaborate with. Legal practice is shrinking and the business of delivering legal services is expanding rapidly.
Law is no longer the exclusive province of lawyers. Legal knowledge is not the sole element of legal delivery—business and technological competencies are equally important. It’s a new ballgame—one that most lawyers are unprepared for.
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How did we get here and are legal careers for most a dead end? Spoiler alert: there’s tremendous opportunity in the legal industry. The caveat: all lawyers must have basic business and technological competency whether they pursue practice careers or leverage their legal knowledge as a skill in legal delivery and/or allied professional careers.
Upskilling the legal profession is already a key issue, a requisite for career success. Lawyers must learn new skills like project management, data analytics, deployment of technology, and process design to leverage their legal knowledge. Simply knowing the law will not cut it anymore.
From DSC:
I really appreciate the work of the above two men whose articles I’m highlighting here. I continue to learn a lot from them and am grateful for their work.
That said, just like it’s a lot to expect a faculty member (in higher ed) who teaches online to not only be a subject matter expert, but also to be skilled in teaching, web design, graphic design, navigation design, information design, audio design, video editing, etc…it’s a lot to expect for a lawyer to be a skilled lawyer, business person, and technician. I realize that Mark was only saying a basic level of competency…but even that can be difficult to achieve at times. Why? Because people have different skillsets, passions, and interests. One might be a good lawyer, but not a solid technician…or vice versa. One might be a solid professor, but isn’t very good with graphic design.
What enterprises intend to do with artificial intelligence — from zdnet.com by Joe McKendrick
Survey shows business process automation and customer support are the low-hanging fruit with initial AI rollouts, but many organizations are moving on to tackle data analytics.
Excerpt:
The leading categories of use cases seeing AI investments and work include the following:
- Business process automation 49%
- Customer support/Chatbots 47%
- Data extraction 43%
- Contract analytics 28%
- Voice/video processing/imaging 25%