As Zev Eigen explains it, the future of law will have a lot to do with math.
Eigen is a lawyer in Los Angeles with Littler Global, a worldwide firm that focuses on management-side employment law. He’s also a data scientist with a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has combined his expertise to become global director of data analytics at the law firm.
So Eigen seems to know a thing or two about the kind of math that sprawls across black boards in a fog of letters and symbols. This is precisely the scary kind of math that a good number of lawyers fear.
But Eigen says that’s okay. The future of law won’t demand that lawyers know how to build those equations themselves, he explains. The future will be about knowing how to benefit from the information such math can provide.
Eigen is an advocate for the use of data to discover things like how people collaborate, to predict how a regulator might respond to a case, or to streamline decision making so lawyers — or perhaps even machines — can make snap decisions on certain matters.
Lawyers can benefit from this information without having to know how the math behind it works, he explains.
It’s like driving. A car may be a complicated machine, but you don’t need to be an engineer to know how to drive a car. Eigen wants lawyers to learn how to “drive” data analytics.
“I’m a big proponent and a big advocate of making sure we’re all good consumers of the information,” Eigen said.
Eigen was a keynote speaker at Lawyering in the 21st Century, a forum hosted by LexisNexis and Ryerson University’s Legal Innovation Zone. The event, which took place at Ryerson in Toronto on last week, was based on the premise that change is coming quickly, and lawyers need to be ready.
Lawyers have been comfortable with incremental change, but technology is empowering consumers to disrupt the profession faster than lawyers have been used to, said Chris Bentley, executive director of the Legal Innovation Zone.
“Consumers want what they want, and the way they want it. And they want it at the price they are prepared to pay,” Bentley said. “Amazon and Google got big not by serving the richest, but by serving the rest.”
Change will not come solely in the form of technology, the forum was told.
Ben Heineman, Jr., who was the top in-house lawyer at General Electric Corp. for about 18 years until he retired in 2005, said a corporate general counsel must do more than rubber-stamp a CEO’s actions or a board’s decisions.
He said a GC must also be an outstanding expert, a wise counsellor and an accountable leader — someone willing to make not just legal decisions, but also moral judgments.
Heineman said the skill of the future will be knowing where to land on the decision-making continuum. Some general counsel are inveterate naysayers, and they risk being excluded from future decision making, he said. Others are inveterate yeasayers, and they risk being indicted, he added. “Somewhere between those two extremes is where we have to operate.”
Amazon and Google got big not by serving the richest, but by serving the rest.
The forum involved more than sitting and listening. In a design workshop, participants had to brainstorm ideas for a system or app that might get people to actually read legal documents before agreeing to them. In a “Lean Six Sigma” workshop, lawyers had to build a flow chart of a typical legal task so they could pin point the root cause of a specific problem or streamline ways to complete the task faster.
But a lot of the future involves math, and some Canadian firms are already diving in.
McMillan LLP, for example, is working with a data scientist to analyze the firm’s dockets, personnel assignments, timing, and document flow. The idea is to see if there are ways the firm can more accurately determine its own costs and margins. “Most law firms have this information. What they’re not doing is analyzing it systematically,” says Tim Murphy, a partner with McMillan in Toronto.
Other firms are pursing other forms of innovation. The Toronto office of Baker & McKenzie LLP has just been chosen to serve as the firm’s global Innovation Lab for Multidisciplinary Collaboration.
For some, the math underpinning a lot of these developments is complex, but Eigen insists that lawyers should never be afraid to admit that they can’t understand it.
Eigen said that before hiring any data scientists, lawyers should ask them to explain their methods and their math. This could well be an efficient way to determine just how well they know their stuff.
“They should be able to explain it to you in the same way you are tasked with explaining things to clients,” Eigen said.
Financial Post
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