By Nathan Alamillo, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law third-year law student, and Dan Linna.

The Catalog of Law Firm Innovations identifies innovative tools that law firms have implemented to improve their delivery of legal services to their clients. An updated version of the Catalog, which will be released in early 2023, contains more than 825 entries, including seventeen law firms that have created data-breach assessment tools. These tools help clients react to data-breach incidents and provide guidance about how to comply with data privacy laws of various jurisdictions. These seventeen law firms each created one to three data-breach assessment tools of varying forms and uses.

A data-breach assessment tool is a computer-based product that clients can use to obtain a legal solution and guidance when they experience a data breach, or to prevent data-breach incidents. These tools may take the form of algorithmic tools that assess the risk of a client’s situation by obtaining responses from the client as inputs and producing an output, typically a data-breach risk assessment report. A client inputs their factual circumstances, usually by answering a series of questions in a survey or digital interview, and then receives responses in the form of potential action items to their data-breach incident. These tools provide a useful and cost-effective product to clients that gives them guidance on how to react to their specific scenario.

In the Catalog, most of the data-breach assessment tools are classified as an “expert system.” This is a rule-based product that organizes expert knowledge and provides direction to clients who input information in response to questions. However, data-breach assessment tools take a variety of forms, with some of them serving as “information management” or “data analytics” tools, depending on how they assist clients.

Data-breach assessment tools are a leading example of the productization of legal services. As compared to legal-services delivery in other areas, data-breach assessment tools provide an example of how law firms can give clients legal solutions in non-traditional forms. A handful of examples illustrate the variety of data-breach assessment tools that law firms are offering.

The LexShift Data Breach Notification Advisor is an example of a data-breach assessment tool that provides clients “automated analysis and advice” so that they can comply with federal and state data-breach notification laws. The tool learns about the client’s factual scenario through a digital interview, performs an analysis through an algorithm, and produces answers for clients. Through the tool, end-user clients receive legal guidance and advice.

DLA Piper’s “NOTIFY” is a “web-based tool” designed to bring “consistency and accountability into data-breach response handling.” The firm describes the tool as using a quantitative approach to measuring data-breach risks by using an algorithm to create an automated risk assessment report. DLA Piper says that the tool reduces what would be hours of conversation to perform a risk assessment of a company.

Reed Smith’s “Breach RespondeRS” works similarly. The tool identifies common factual data-breach situations and provides clients with a response to their data-breach incident. Clients answer a set of questions, and the tool identifies common risks to be addressed in a data-breach investigation.

CMS’s “Breach Assistant” is a slightly different type of expert system tool. It is an interactive mobile platform that provides clients legal advice on how to deal with a data breach. After clients answer questions in the app, they receive guidance on various data laws, a data-breach response checklist, and a digital menu advising whether a client must notify regulators and individuals.

Based on the data we’ve collected for the Catalog, eight UK law firms have created fifteen of these data-breach tools and eight US law firms have created twelve of these tools. Furthermore, we have seen that these tools are only a recent development. Seven out of the twenty-eight of these tools have been introduced in the past three years.

We are in the process of completing a significant update to the Catalog of Law Firm Innovations, which we plan to launch in early 2023. If you are aware of a law firm innovation that is not listed in the Catalog, including data-breach assessment tools, please use this link to submit it so that we can include it in the upcoming update to the Catalog.

Guest post by Seung Hoon Park, a 2L at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Seung Hoon was a research assistant for Daniel W. Linna Jr. during the summer of 2020. In this guest post, Seung Hoon examines the current regulation of South Korea’s legal tech industry and emphasizes the need for change. Seung Hoon discusses how updating legal-services regulations will help grow South Korea’s legal tech industry so that more law firms can provide services based on advanced technology.

Introduction

In South Korea, the legal tech industry is in its early stages, exploring its way forward in an environment limited by regulations. Large South Korean law firms are adopting technology tools, such as e-discovery and digital forensics equipment.[i] Although lawyers use technology tools to help them deliver services, they are not yet providing client-facing tools using technology, such as expert systems that can be used by clients to solve a specific problem. Most of South Korea’s legal tech services are provided by start-up companies. The services provided by these start-up companies are mainly divided into 1) attorney-search services, 2) automated document completion services, and 3) legal information research services. Below, I introduce the contents of each service, the start-ups providing it, and related regulations. Continue Reading Legal Innovation in South Korea: Lawyer Regulation Stifling Progress

By Mona Kalantar and Dan Linna

On April 14, 2020 seven interdisciplinary teams of 36 Northwestern computer science and law students presented demos of the projects they completed in the 2020 CS+Law Innovation Lab. Each student team worked closely with an external project partner and Professors Kris Hammond and Dan Linna. Nearly 250 people attended the online event, not including the student teams. Video of the event is available on YouTube.

The Innovation Lab immerses students in the product development process while they work with a project partner on a real-world legal-services delivery problem. The student teams explore the problem, develop an understanding of stakeholders’ needs, brainstorm, prototype, test ideas, and iterate through the development of a technology-based solution. Continue Reading Innovation Lab Demos: Northwestern Law and Computer Science Students Partner with Organizations to build Legal Technology Solutions

In January 2020, I launched Version 1.03 of the Catalog of Law Firm Innovations, part of the Legal Services Innovation Index. Version 1.03 includes an additional 379 law firm innovations, bringing the total number of entries to 706. Northwestern Law students Alexander Crowley, Lauren Diner, Mona Kalantar, and Yoon Hoo Lee helped conduct the research for this version.

The goal of the Catalog is to “[i]dentify concrete examples of law firms offering products, legal services, or consulting services that constitute innovations in legal-service delivery or foster legal-service delivery innovations.” While we have employed systematic rigor to curate this information, the Catalog does not purport to be an exhaustive collection of all law firm innovations.

Version 1.03 includes innovations submitted through the form available on the Catalog page. Before adding these innovations to the Catalog, we verified the information, including the practice area and discipline driving the innovation. After making these additions, we reviewed prior entries, updating information where appropriate. We also removed six entries that had been added to version 1.02 after determining that they did not meet the Catalog criteria.

In addition to the submissions that we’ve received, we browsed the websites of the Global 100 (American Lawyer), Am Law 200 (American Lawyer), and Canadian top 30 law firms (Lexpert), looking for innovations that meet the Catalog criteria. Next, no matter what we found while browsing each law firm website, we completed specific Google searches for innovations at each individual firm.

After some experimentation, we settled on conducting two specific searches for each firm: “[firm name] innovation” and “[firm name] launch” (without any quotes). For each search, we reviewed the first five pages of results returned by Google and clicked on each result that appeared to lead to an innovation at the law firm that met the Catalog criteria. For each innovation that actually met the criteria, a team member confirmed the details on the law firm’s website and added the entry to the Catalog. A second team member reviewed each entry, including the designated discipline/tool, area of law, and description.

My team and I welcome feedback on how to improve this resource. We are currently working on improving the consistency of classifications and pruning entries that upon closer inspection do not satisfy the Catalog criteria.

If you know about a law firm innovation that is not included in the Catalog, please submit the innovation using the form available on the Catalog page. We will review your entry and include it in our next release.

How do we evaluate the quality and value of legal services? For example, if we compare two proposed contracts for a commercial agreement, how do we determine which contract is of higher quality? How do we determine the total value produced by the process of drafting, negotiating, and finalizing each contract? Would our answers change if some or all of the services are produced by a software application? If a software application is used, how would we evaluate the quality of any training data inputs, the development process, and the outputs of the software application? Would our assessment of the quality and value of the software application change if the software application is used to serve individuals who would otherwise go without a lawyer?

These are just some of the questions that I discuss in this draft book chapter, Evaluating Legal Services: The Need for a Quality Movement and Standard Measures of Quality and Value, the final version of which will be available in the Research Handbook on Big Data Law edited by Dr. Roland Vogl, forthcoming 2020, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. I’ve included the abstract for my chapter below. Continue Reading Evaluating Legal Services: The Need for a Quality Movement and Standard Measures of Quality and Value – Chapter in Research Handbook on Big Data Law

Mona Kalantar
Mona Kalantar

Mona Kalantar, a 3L at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, has been a research assistant for Daniel W. Linna Jr. at since May 2019. In this guest post, Mona highlights ways for attorneys to become data-driven. Doing so will add to the general body of knowledge and create industry-standards that could lead to the improvement of legal services.

Guest post by Mona Kalantar

In his 2012 article, Where is the ‘Quality Movement’ in Law Practice?, Professor William H. Simon argued that the quest for continuous improvement has largely bypassed legal practice. The legal profession has not fully embraced quality reforms that we have seen in other professions. Today, the drive for innovation is leading lawyers to think about how to provide greater value with fewer resources. The market is producing innovations within legal-services delivery organizations that promote streamlining processes, facilitating connectivity between legal professionals and clients, and creating opportunities for alternative fee arrangements. Despite the growing demand for legal-services delivery innovation, there is less evidence of demand for measuring the quality of legal work, performance, and outcomes. Continue Reading Guest Post: Getting Around to the Quality Movement in Law

Guest Post By Alex Crowley and Mona Kalantar

Over 120 attendees engaged in a vibrant discussion about the future of law and technology at Northwestern University’s first public meeting of its Law and Technology Initiative on September 5, 2019. Attendees included academics and students in computer science and law and lawyers and allied professionals from law firms, corporate legal departments, legal aid organizations, alternative legal services providers, consultancies, and legal startups.

The Law and Technology Initiative aims to address two needs: 

  • Technology for Law: First, as governments, justice systems, and legal-services providers adopt technologies of automation, prediction, intelligent search, and semantic analysis, there is a need to proactively guide and shape these technologies, even before they emerge.
  • Law of Technology: Second, there is a need for legal and regulatory guidance for new technologies, as many affect privacy, security, individual liberties, and views of liability and responsibility in the face of machine decision-making. 

Continue Reading Northwestern Law and Technology Initiative: 120 Attendees Discuss Law and Technology Challenges and Opportunities

This is a draft abstract for a talk that I gave to the Northwestern University Computer Science faculty on April 22, 2019.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence presents many opportunities to improve law and society. At the same time, AI presents risks and potential harms. From a Law and Computational Technologies perspective, these opportunities and challenges can be separated into two categories. First, ethics, regulations, and laws that apply to technology. Second, the use of technology to improve legal-services delivery, justice systems, and the law itself. Each category also presents massive opportunities to use technology to preserve and expand the rule of law.

The deployment of AI raises many interesting questions about the application of existing law and regulation. AI also raises questions about the need for new law and regulation, including to ensure fairness, accountability, and transparency. Computational technologies also create opportunities to embed law, regulations, respect for human rights, and democratic principles into innovation processes and products, systems, and platforms by design and default. The goal ought to be to use law and regulation to guide the development, deployment, and maintenance of AI toward improving society, without unnecessarily impeding innovation.

Technology has also demonstrated the potential to revolutionize legal-services delivery, thus improving access to law and legal services for everyone. In the U.S., estimates are that more than 80% of the impoverished and more than 50% of the middle class lack access to legal services. Even some legal needs of businesses, large and small, go unmet. Computational technologies hold great promise for automating the delivery of various legal services across this spectrum. For basic legal needs, smartphones and other devices in the future could provide all users with an inventory of their legal rights and obligations, as well as solutions to common legal problems. Better yet, AI can foster Proactive Law to identify potential problems and prevent them from arising, or at least mitigate the risk.

As technologies advance, savvy lawyers will use them to augment their services. Innovative lawyers will embrace technologies that replace low-value, repetitive tasks and seize abundant opportunities to use technology to deliver greater value to clients and also contribute to interdisciplinary teams solving “wicked problems” for society. Updating laws and regulations for emerging technologies is one obvious area in which lawyers ought to be able to demonstrate that they can add tremendous value.

Innovation in legal-services delivery has been slow, however, in part because regulations traditionally prohibited lawyers from sharing fees with, and prohibited investment by, anyone who is not a lawyer. Consequently, lawyers and technologists rarely collaborate on legal-services delivery projects. But this is changing. 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.

References

Michael Genesereth, Computational Law: The Cop in the Backseat, http://complaw.stanford.edu/readings/complaw.pdf 

Gillian K. Hadfield, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), https://www.amazon.com/Rules-Flat-World-Invented-Reinvent-ebook/dp/B01LYZXIVU 

Mireille Hildebrandt, Law As Computation in the Era of Artificial Legal Intelligence. Speaking Law to the Power of Statistics (June 7, 2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2983045 

David Howarth, Law as Engineering: Thinking About What Lawyers Do (Edward Elgar Pub, 2014), https://www.amazon.com/Law-Engineering-Thinking-About-Lawyers/dp/178254013X 

John O. McGinnis & Russell G. Pearce, The Great Disruption: How Machine Intelligence Will Transform the Role of Lawyers in the Delivery of Legal Services (May 13, 2014), 82 Fordham Law Review 3041 (2014) Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2436937 

George Siedel and Helena Haapio, Proactive Law for Managers: A Hidden Source of Competitive Advantage, (Routledge, 2011), https://www.amazon.com/Proactive-Law-Managers-Competitive-Advantage/dp/1409401006

This last fall, I began updating the Legal Services Innovation Index, focusing first on the Catalog of Law Firm Innovations. I have had the help of three research assistants, Northwestern second-year law students Lauren Diner, Douglas Lavey, and Yoon Hoo Lee.

We’ve added 112 entries to Version 1.02 of the Law Firm Innovation Catalog, for a total of 334 entries. I previously described the methodology employed to curate the list of innovations on the Catalog page. In addition to the innovations that we’ve gathered, many were submitted by law firms, each of which we reviewed before adding to the Catalog.

In addition to the curation process described on the Catalog page, we also performed a Google search for each of the 264 law firms that comprise the Am Law 200 (American Lawyer), Global 100 (American Lawyer), and Canadian top 30 law firms (Lexpert). The search query included the law firm name with the terms “innovation,” “product,” and “client service.” We reviewed the first two pages of results returned by Google. This search process was not designed to be comprehensive, but merely to help us identify well known innovations. Only innovations listed on the law firm’s website have been included in the Catalog.

The goal of the Catalog is to “identify concrete examples of law firms offering products, legal services, or consulting services that constitute innovations in legal-service delivery or foster legal-service delivery innovations.” As described above, the curation of this information has been somewhat ad hoc. While we have employed a measure of systematic rigor while curating and reviewing this information, the Catalog does not purport to be a representative survey of the legal landscape. It is important to understand and disclose these limitations before drawing conclusions based on comparisons across categories, between versions, etc.

The full-screen Tableau visualizations of versions 1.02 and 1.01 of the Catalog are available on my Tableau Public page. As always, I welcome all feedback on how to improve this resource.

Has your law firm implemented an innovation that is not listed on the Catalog? Please submit the information, using the form available at the bottom of the Catalog page. We will review your entry and add it to the Catalog soon. Going forward, I plan to complete updates more frequently.

Next, my team and I are working on updates to the Law School Innovation Index. Stay tuned for additional information.

Last year’s launch of the Legal Services Innovation Index attracted much more attention than I anticipated. I knew that some would find the information useful, having been in the position of trying to gather data about innovation both as a lawyer in a law firm and a professor in a law school. But I underestimated the demand.

To date, there have been over 29,600 views of the three Tableau visualizations that make up the Index: the Law Firm Innovation Catalog, the Law Firm Innovation Index, and the prototype Law School Innovation Index.

Now that I’ve moved to Chicago and settled in at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law as a Visiting Professor of Law, I’ve begun work to update each component of the Index. Fortunately, three Northwestern second-year law students working with me as research assistants have already made substantial contributions to this project:

  • Lauren Diner
  • Doug Lavey
  • Yoon Hoo Lee

I’ve included their bios below, which will soon be added to the Index website.

Lauren, Doug, Yoon, and I drafted the following update.

The Index To Date

The Legal Services Innovation Index launched in August 2017 to describe and measure the state of legal-services delivery innovation. Version 1.0 launched with (1) a Catalog of more than 200 innovations from over 100 law firms of all sizes located in the US, UK, EU, Australia, and Canada and (2) a Law Firm Innovation Index measuring innovation in 260 law firms (the AmLaw Global 100, AmLaw 200, and Canadian 30).

In November 2017, we launched a prototype Law School Innovation Index and added 17 innovations in version 1.01 of the Catalog. Law firms had previously submitted each of these innovations via the submission form on the Catalog page.

Our mission is to measure and assessing innovation, thereby helping legal industry consumers and product and services providers better understand the legal innovation landscape and inform their decisions. Consumers include clients and law students. Providers include lawyers, law firms, alternative legal services providers, and legal technology companies, to name a few.

Our vision is that measurement and assessment of innovation will drive the legal industry forward, thereby increasing access to legal services and justice for all. Our mission and vision respond to the call to action by Jim Sandman, President of the Legal Services Corporation, that we most move from measuring revenue and profit to measuring technology adoption. (More about this on the Index Overview page.)

Interest in the Index and feedback received exceeded our highest expectations. Users saw the potential for the Index to become a key hub of information within a rapidly changing legal ecosystem.

Upcoming Index Updates

Where do we go from here? We are focused on the following goals in the near term:

  1. Updating the Catalog of law firm innovations. We plan to release version 1.02 of the Catalog by the end of October.
  2. Encouraging law firms and their collaborating partners to submit innovations for addition to the Catalog via a form available via a button at the bottom of the Catalog page.
  3. Beginning later in October, encouraging law schools to submit information for updates to the prototype Law School Innovation Index, which we plan to begin updating later this year.

Catalog of Law Firm Innovations Update Methodology

Version 1.02 of the Catalog of law firm innovations will include all innovation submissions received by October 19. Before adding an innovation to the Catalog, we will verify the information, including its categorization by practice area and discipline driving the innovation.

Additionally, we continue to review various public resources, such as The Financial Times, Legal Week, The Recorder, and Business Wire. We have also conducted uniform Google searches to locate law firm innovations.

When we find reference to a law firm innovation, we confirm that it appears on the law firm’s website before adding it to the Catalog. Limiting the innovations in the Catalog to those identified on law firm websites enables us to confirm the details, including that the innovation is currently offered to clients.

Once an innovation has been identified, we categorize and record each innovation across various factors, including: type of tool, area of law involved, and relationship (internal to the firm, a partnership, etc.). This allows users to analyze the data from a number of perspectives.

Law Firms: Submit Your Innovations by October 19

Law firms and their collaborating partners can help us by submitting information about their innovations by using the form available via a button at the bottom of the Catalog page. All submissions received by October 19 will be verified and added to the Catalog.

Who are we?

We are a team led by Dan Linna, Visiting Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. The student team brings with them a diversity of backgrounds and interest areas including psychology, education, and public policy.

Lauren Diner

Lauren Diner

Lauren completed her undergraduate degree in psychology and elementary education in 2015. She then worked in an elementary school before earning her Master’s degree in Bioethics from New York University. Over the summer, she completed the Institute for the Future of Law Practice bootcamp and interned with Neota Logic. She will graduate from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in May 2020. Lauren will join Allen & Overy’s New York office as a summer associate in 2019.

Lauren’s LinkedIn home page

Lauren’s Twitter home page

 

Doug Lavey

Doug Lavey

Doug plans to focus on the intersection of disruptive technologies, public policy, and the law. After completing his undergraduate degree, he worked as a consultant, implementing enterprise systems at large public institutions. He is currently pursuing a concurrent Master’s in Public Policy degree in addition to his JD. Doug will graduate from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and the Harvard Kennedy School in May 2020. Doug will join Perkins Coie’s Chicago office as a summer associate in 2019.

Doug’s LinkedIn home page

Doug’s Twitter home page

Yoon Hoo Lee

Yoon Hoo Lee

Yoon plans to use her teaching background together with her interest in process improvement and technology to better serve clients. After completing her undergraduate degree in Plan II Honors and Latin at the University of Texas at Austin, she worked as a middle school Latin teacher at her alma mater. She will graduate from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in May 2020. Yoon will join Weil, Gotshal & Manges’ Dallas office as a summer associate in 2019.

Yoon’s LinkedIn home page

Yoon’s Twitter home page