In the fast-moving world of business, legal departments need to keep up with new laws and changing customer expectations. They must also adapt to a changing landscape of collaboration, technology and innovation. Yet many legal stakeholders are still operating under old, legacy law and relying on outdated delivery models. This creates an enormous obstacle to delivering the value legal consumers need and want. That’s why we have a responsibility to lead the legal industry into new law—law that is customer-centric, agile and multidisciplinary.
A new law is a piece of legislation or an established rule that governs a particular subject matter. It can be created by a legislator, an executive branch official or by the judiciary. The process of creating a new law begins with an idea for a bill being introduced to Congress by a member of the House of Representatives or Senate. The bill is then assigned to a committee where it is studied, discussed, changed and voted on. If it passes through both chambers of Congress, the President signs it and it becomes a public law, known as an Act.
While a statute might establish a specific rule, the concept of law is much broader and includes judicial precedent. Jurisprudence is a set of principles established by decisions made in previous cases that form the basis for how future cases should be decided. A legal scholar who is familiar with precedent and the nuances of the law can draw upon these prior decisions in making future rulings.
The legal industry has been slow to adapt to changes in the economy, society and the world at large. The emergence of law new is a result of an increasing number of legal buyers pushing for change in the industry’s approach to legal work. These changes are being shaped by two principal forces:
A Changing Legal Industry
The most pressing challenge facing the legal industry is how to evolve from a legacy business model focused on preserving law’s status quo to one that delivers more impact to legal consumers and society-at-large. That evolution will require a paradigm shift from provider to customer-centricity and be driven by new customers with demanding requirements, high net promoter scores and growing cost takeout goals.
Legal consumers and the industry are not alone in their struggle to meet these challenges. Other industries have already adapted to the new normal by using collaboration, agility and multidisciplinary teams in their work and in how they serve customers. This is why it’s important to understand the role that legal ops, legal innovation and other forms of legal collaboration can play in driving the transformation toward law new. To be impactful, fit-for-purpose technology must be embedded in a holistic customer-centric legal delivery plan reverse-engineered from the end-user perspective. Only then will we be able to deliver the legal value that customers need and want.