[stult]

Actually, I'm a lawyer and a product owner at a big accounting firm, so I'm pretty well positioned to discuss this topic. I have half a dozen solid startup ideas that I'm tempted to take and start running with right now. Documentation management alone is in desperate need of innovation. I build toy apps in my spare time that cut thousands of dollars of charge hours young associates waste on bullshit tasks, just within my one small practice group. The whole legal software industry is a joke.

But here's the real problem for anyone looking to innovate in that space: the customers. Lawyers are as a rule anti-technology, slow to adapt new techniques, and set in their ways. Worse yet, they just bill their clients for their shitty software like Lexis or WestLaw, so they aren't even personally motivated to reduce costs.

[sitkack]

> cut thousands of dollars of charge hours young associates waste on bullshit tasks

Doesn't this take money away from your firm? It is only when firms are competing on cost, time or client recognized quality that they will institute better workflows via software.

[chuckus]

Depends, there are billable hours e.g. time spent with customers and non-billable hours e.g. administrative tasks not specific to any customer such as payroll, transfer of knowledge between work colleagues. So by targeting reduction of non-billable hours, you would have a compelling reason to sell to firms who bill by time.

[stult]

That's pretty much true in general. Our fees are dictated more by the market than our actual costs. So if we were billing fewer hours, we'd just raise the hourly billing rate for our associates.

From our perspective in the national standards group, we would actually want our associates to just spend more time on value added activities. Instead of wasting time organizing PDFs of exhibits and monkeying around in spreadsheets, we want to them evaluating the relevant legal and technical tax issues. So it's not precisely cost control that is the primary concern, but quality assurance.

[stult]

>Doesn't this take money away from your firm?

No, because we are in fact competing on cost and client-recognized quality, and to a lesser extent time. Plus our fees are driven more by the market than by our actual costs, so if we billed fewer hours, we would simply bill at a higher rate to reach the same expected fee while still maintaining our position in the marketplace. Or if we could reduce our fee, we might be able to win more market share.

The pejorative term in the industry for padding billing with useless busy work is "fee justification," which really shouldn't ever be necessary. Especially in my practice area, because there's always more work that can be done to flesh out our deliverables, which in turn makes them more effective for convincing the IRS (or state equivalent) or an appeals judge. When I say I've cut thousands of dollars of charge hours, we didn't simply stop charging those hours, we allocated them to more useful, value added activities.

Right now, staff spend far too much time inefficiently manipulating data in Excel, manually organizing exhibits, and a variety of other mundane, low cognitive effort tasks (I can't really specify what kinds because that would essentially doxx me). They feel productive, they look productive, and they meet their charge hour goals. And it allows them to procrastinate on the more mentally taxing work, like evaluating the relevant legal and technical tax issues, which in turn detracts from the quality of our service. Our clients aren't paying us to be extra-expensive outsourced spreadsheet monkeys. They're paying us to eliminate uncertainty about complicated legal and tax issues. So freeing up engagement budget and the staff's mental bandwidth to focus on the high value added cognitive services is tremendously useful in improving quality.

And in terms of time, we compete on that in some cases where there's an audit, exam, or appeal deadline and the client came to us late in the game. But that's an edge case and relatively rare. Certainly having a reputation for being quick, efficient, and timely wouldn't hurt our market position, though.

[sitkack]

This is great news! I did a PoC for a document search system for discovery, OCR and full-text search. We deemed it too hard of a sell for law firms. Maybe the landscape is changing.

[kpil]

Ha, never thought about it but I guess it's problematic to compete on cost in a scenario where the clients often need the best advice they can get...

[hunckler]

PactSafe is disrupting the online agreements space, has already raised some serious capital and landed some big name clients with its SaaS platform: http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthunckler/2016/11/03/pactsafe...