LEGALTECH - The world of the simplistic loose
The simple can be even harder than the complex, you have to work very hard to simplify ideas, but when you do you can move mountains - Steve Jobs.
It is difficult to imagine a world where the simplest is the most complex at the same time. For lawyers, the most logical thing is to think that the one with the most history and experience will always have the easiest way to settle disputes. It is difficult for us to understand that the one who went the most and was soaked with complex previous experiences, even if it is unquestionable for the legal world, will not always be the one who found the simplest solution. Experience feeds, but it also clouds the way and creates long-term stagnation, because it is difficult to objectively question what was lived and enjoyed.
Lawyers are educated to withstand the difficulties, the crisis and make the risky decisions of the business, all with a good face and a great mantle of trust.
But reality overcomes us. Today business changes its objectives in a sustained and continuous way, trying to overcome the ideal of flexibility and adaptation that the market expects. And with this they also hope that we will have enough experience to accompany them on roads we have not gone before.
Unfortunately, there are situations for which we have not been prepared, and I cannot help but think that there are other disciplines with better techniques to deal with the current situation. For us lawyers, to consider the possibility of interdisciplinary support, exists only in those scenarios that escape control of the law, because that is what we live and breathe daily.
Our vision for a lot of effort and hours we spend (hours we will charge you as strategic planning), is cloudy and biased by everything we lack to know. It is in this environment that it becomes even more necessary to stop being part of the process and start listening as a judge, with objectivity ahead.
There are other disciplines that prepare professionals with the ability to understand and process information irrefutably better than those that prepare us for the law.
Although it is difficult for us to believe, the best thing about law is to be able to complement it with other business visions, and it is this amalgam that alternative legal services are born. The ALSP are born from the understanding that reality is short of the interpretation of the law and as good lawyers we decided that this is the right time to ask for support.
In disciplines such as process engineering, agile methodologies, and data analysis; we find the "heavenly match" where everything we lack to understand is already said, diagrammed and processed in data collected for years, and it is from this information that we can just analyze what we have been doing wrong by experience.
Little or nothing has to do with the content or specialization of the legal matter being worked on. Here we talk about the operating world around the consultations, signatures, reports and deliverables. That world full of inefficiencies created by lack of simplification of knowledge. The same one that is so necessary now more than ever for remote work.
The solution is simple: to turn the ship to the services leveraged in LEGALTECH.
Here we find a group of dreamy lawyers with disdain to operational tasks, not because of lack of discipline, but because of a deep belief that the added value of the profession is not found in these efforts. This group of weak and simplistic people dared to think of a world where these tasks were fully automated, and understood that from the union with other disciplines they could land their best discourses and intentions, and direct them towards the correction of so many evils created by experience.
Simplification for efficiency is the key.
LEGALTECH is not the solution for all, but if it is the best option for those who believe that the tasks they consume most time within their legal teams are not generating a real contribution to the business.
Stephany Celle
Head of Legal & Public Affairs
Alster.law Peru