This article is based on the panel discussion from The Changing Lawyer LIVE! virtual conference on April 23, 2020. This one-day online seminar was a huge success, with hundreds of registrations. All proceeds from the event, more than $10,000, were donated to the CDC Foundation’s Emergency Response Fund to aid in the battle against the coronavirus. If you missed it, a full replay is available here.

The rapid onset of the coronavirus pandemic spurred clients to ask new questions and make new demands of their lawyers. Sherry Kappel, technology evangelist for Litera, moderated our panel asking how knowledge managers have kept up with these accelerating demands.

Knowledge management encompasses more than just knowledge

Before the pandemic began, knowledge management had already expanded to include far more than just knowledge: innovation, technology, process improvement, project management, conflicts, and more. One key function that knowledge management departments filled in the early days of the shutdown involved addressing technology gaps. Greg Lambert, chief knowledge services officer at Jackson Walker, explained: “In my experience, law firms don’t change until they’re forced to change. Take Zoom: it was banned at most firms, until suddenly it was one of the most pivotal pieces of technology that they needed to communicate.”

Disruption creates opportunity and changes are likely to stick

The rapid recent changes — in laws, workplaces, and how we communicate — have provided a huge opportunity for knowledge managers to step in and meet their firms’ needs. Nicola Shaver, managing director of innovation and knowledge at Paul Hastings, realized that she had “dramatically underestimated” how much lawyers were still learning through apprenticeship. “Lawyers would walk next door to get information about how to do things. This handing down of knowledge and methods from one attorney to the next is very beneficial in some ways, but it’s also stultifying for a firm that’s trying to modernize. Now, the ability to walk next door for information has been cut off. That creates a real opportunity for people in functions like ours.”

Law firms don’t change until they’re forced to change

Williams-Range also saw tremendous opportunities for growth. She said: “We’ve had to accelerate so many changes. It used to be that we’d create five or six thought leadership pieces a week. Now we’re essentially on a news cycle; we’re working on 26 pieces. We started a daily compilation of all global governmental and legislative changes around the pandemic that we send to our clients every day. We’ve created a resource center around this; for some of our thought leadership, we’ve had more than 90,000 views. But we can’t just reopen an office without understanding what it takes to do that.”

Shaver added: “The situation with e-signatures is kind of hilarious. This technology has been around and you’d think it would have been a no-brainer all along, but it hasn’t been. Now that we’re using them, no one is going to go back to trying to corral people to get wet signatures. It’s such an obvious improvement.”

Collaboration and connection are on the rise

Despite the physical distance between employees, our panel believed their teams were closer than ever. Shaver explained: “Weirdly, our connection has improved now that we’re all remote. Departments that had focused on their own projects are now reaching out to one another. Knowledge attorneys are being pulled into more meetings with partners and are being asked to collaborate on solving problems. In a sense, I think we’re seeing a slight flattening of the hierarchy in a law firm. There’s an understanding that we’re all in this together.”

Lambert agreed, pointing out that his firm’s attorneys had communicated more over the first five weeks of the pandemic than they did over the previous two years. But he added a note of caution, saying: “Our community in Houston saw this after Hurricane Harvey: there’s a honeymoon period after a disaster where there’s a lot of collaboration and community. Then a sense of tribalism pops up and it takes strong leadership to push through that feeling that you have to protect what’s yours. I just want people to realize what’s happening if things start slipping.”

Overall, our participants felt the future was bright. “In this environment, one critical thing we can’t forget is culturally who we are,” said Williams-Range. “How we feed off each other is a key component. That’s why it’s so important to have those moments of connection. While virtual happy hours may sound strange, they’re so important to supporting our culture. I’ve had more connection-building since this happened than I ever did before, when I just didn’t stop and make time for people. We can’t forget how important connection is; if we lose that, we lose our culture."

Watch the full discussion here

What is the secret to a happy life? Amid all the current anxiety and uncertainty, there are plenty of practical steps that we can take to increase our own happiness levels, and in turn make others feel happier. Author Gretchen Rubin, an influential observer of human nature, outlined some of the key things to think about. “The first place to start is with our own body,” said Rubin.

“Our physical experience will always colour our emotional experience.”

The first place to start is with our own body

Most adults need at least seven hours’ sleep, but this can be hard to achieve – particularly in light of world events. Something that can make a big difference is to ensure that you go to bed at the same time every night, avoiding the problem of “social jetlag” – when bedtime varies by three or four hours every night, causing exhaustion. Getting ready for bed early on, before you feel too tired to do so, and setting an alarm to remind you when to tuck in for the night, can help establish the routine.

Next, get some exercise. Even just a 20-minute walk can boost energy, mood, and even our immune function – and it also helps with sleep.

The physical environment has an impact on us too; many people feel that having a clear out and creating order in their surroundings gives them greater inner calm. This is really an illusion, but a helpful one. “A friend once said to me, ‘I’ve finally cleaned out my fridge. Now I can switch careers,’” recalled Rubin.

Any tidying that can be done without delay – throwing away junk mail, moving an empty coffee cup to the sink – should be done immediately. “Then there are lots of tasks that can be done at any time; and so, they are done at no time,” observed Rubin. “If you keep a list of these things, you can blitz through it in a ‘power hour’ every week. It’s astonishing what you can do in one hour.”

And when it comes to de-cluttering, ask yourself whether you either need, use, or love the item. If not, why do you still have it?

Probably the biggest impact on happiness is our relationships: quite simply, we need strong relationships to be happy. During this era of social distancing, contact with friends and family is vital. A weekly email to family members, or just sending a few family photos every day, can dramatically increase people’s feeling of engagement. And while you are out on a walk, why not call a friend? We often feel that we have the most to talk about with the people we see most often; frequent contact makes a big difference.

Probably the biggest impact on happiness is our relationships

But while relationships are important, some people may be feeling starved of solitude in the current environment. Having some time to themselves could prove restorative.

Finally, is it selfish to think about our own happiness at this current time? Not at all. Rubin explained: “It’s really by taking care of ourselves that we then strengthen ourselves to turn outward, and to take care of others.”

Watch the full discussion here

Corporate legal departments are feeling the pressure of the pandemic. With an uncertain economic outlook, they are readying themselves to make cutbacks, which will also be bad news for their external lawyers. It is only a matter of time before general counsel pick up the telephone to hear their chief financial officer demanding a 10 percent cut in legal spend. In turn, general counsels will be speed-dialing their law firms to insist on an immediate discount in rates. We have seen all this before, in the financial crisis of 2008.

So what can be done? Stephanie Corey, co-founder and general partner of UpLevel Ops, advised law firms to “scrub the data” and find ways to offer their services even more efficiently to their clients. “If law firms start doing that, being creative and coming to their clients with ideas, they will look leaps and bounds ahead of their competitors. Very few firms actually come to the table with data.” The economic downturn will inject urgency into longstanding debates around the use of automation and outsourcing work to alternative service providers. “If law firms are not charging ridiculous rates and are doing things in a technologically savvy way, they could steal some of this work,” she pointed out.

The current environment offers a crucial window of opportunity for those who want to bring about change within their legal business

The traditional law firm model has always acted as a barrier to firms investing in technology because older equity partners worry they will have retired from the firm before the investment bears fruit. But now convincing these partners to make that investment is going to be much easier. Jessop said: “Now they can really see what that technology will drive [and that] they’ll be more profitable as a result”.

Do you really want to fly across the country for a two-hour meeting, when we’re all finding that Zoom is way less awkward than it was a few months ago

Reflecting this shift away from paper, Litera has seen huge demand for its transaction management tool. Meltzer said: “We had been hearing those stories about companies sending out couriers to get signatures and pushing paper around, and clients got upset. We’ve had a good response [to the software]. In normal circumstances, trying to get people to adopt those practices is a lot harder. This is a catalyst for change unlike any we’ve seen for quite a long time.”

As McGovern concluded: “How firms react to this change, and whether they embrace it and use it to drive forward, will be the defining difference between firms and whether they can come out of this even stronger.”

Watch the full conversation here

“Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” The quote from Winston Churchill sprang into the mind of writer and director Aaron Sorkin when he heard the life story of Molly Bloom – a tale that he turned into a 2017 film Molly’s Game, based on Bloom’s 2014 memoir of the same name.

Bloom’s story is a roller coaster of highs and lows. When a freak accident robbed her of her career as an Olympic-level skier, she re-invented herself to build an empire running glitzy high-stakes poker games – only for this to collapse around her. Undeterred, she wrote a book of her experiences – and didn’t give up until it made the silver screen.

“I’m a master of disaster,” quipped Bloom. “And when you’re a master of disaster, you need to get good at solutions. I’ve developed something of a playbook for overcoming pretty much anything.”

I’m a master of disaster

Bloom outlined her remarkable life story, highlighting the different “plays” she had learned along the way. An enthusiastic skier, her dreams of one day becoming an Olympian hit a setback aged 12, when she was diagnosed with severe scoliosis and needed major back surgery. Doctors told her she wouldn’t be able to continue skiing, but a year later, she was back on the slopes. “That’s the first Play in the playbook,” she said. “Trust yourself.”

Eight years later, she had made it to the Olympic qualifiers. But as she flew down the course, a piece of pine bough lodged itself perfectly between her boot and binding. She found herself 20 feet in the air, wearing only one ski – and landed on her head. Did she still want to go on? The answer was no. Play Two: be brave enough to let go.

With her lifelong Olympic dream now behind her, Bloom headed to LA, where she took a job as a personal assistant, and was asked to serve drinks at poker games. When big ticket movie stars such as Ben Affleck and Leonardo DiCaprio walked in the room – along with heavy hitters from the world of finance and politics – Bloom recognized the size of the opportunity. After a while, she set up her own poker table (Play Three - “take calculated risks”) and went on to make millions of dollars over the next six years, hosting high stakes poker and “living a life that seemed like a movie,” as Bloom described it.

But she got sucked in. By 2010, she had moved to New York, and by taking the huge risk of guaranteeing the game and “becoming the bank,” she had monopolized the New York poker scene. But she was getting reckless. “There was $20m on the table,” recalled Bloom.

“And I knew two of the players couldn’t pay. I started doing the one thing that my attorneys had told me never to do. I started taking a rake – a percentage out of each pot.” This was illegal.

In 2011, Bloom took a call from her poker dealer telling her “Don’t come here – the Feds are looking for you.” She escaped to the mountainside home of her childhood where her mother still lived, and took two years to think long and hard about her actions. “It was my fault,” was the conclusion she reached.

I started doing the one thing that my attorneys had told me never to do

By April 13, 2013, Bloom had moved to LA, ready to get her life back on track. At 4:45am she awoke to find 17 FBI agents pointing guns at her. She was under arrest.  

The prosecutors said they would push for a 10-year jail term unless Bloom agreed to give them information about the poker players, and wear a wire during games. But she refused. “This is Play Four: don’t let anybody take your integrity.”

Ultimately, the judge concluded that Bloom did not deserve jail time – much to her relief. Bloom praised the relationship she had with her lawyer, Jim Walden. “When I first walked into his office, I said, ‘So what’s our angle and what’s our strategy?” And he said, “Integrity is going to be both our angle and our strategy.” That was like a gut punch – I realized that was who I wanted to be. It was a transformational moment.”

With the sentencing behind her, Bloom wanted a fresh start, and realized the answer lay in her own story. She wrote a book – then actively pursued a meeting with writer Aaron Sorkin to turn it into a movie. Eventually, he agreed to a one-hour meeting – and she gave it her best pitch. When she finished, he remarked: “I’ve never met anyone so down on their luck and yet so full of themselves.” This, said Bloom, was Play Five: “Fake it until you make it.”

She added: “Five years ago I was pleading guilty in a Federal Court, and two years ago I got to go to the Oscars. That brings me to my last Play: never give up. It cannot beat you, if you do not quit.”

Watch the full discussion here

Panel moderator Alma Asay, one of Litera’s esteemed evangelists, spoke with four participants about how clients' needs have shifted and legal technology has kept pace.

Flexibility is key as technology adapts to new use-cases

Legal technology leaders are “the nerve center for business-critical processes in law firms,” said Jake Heller, co-founder and chief executive of Casetext, a legal research and brief-writing platform. This demands quick adjustments. He continued: “At Casetext, we had just launched a new product for writing legal briefs in late February. Almost immediately, we had clients asking for different capabilities. Could it be applied to insurance disputes, particularly around business interruption insurance? Could it be used in bankruptcy and employment issues, such as giving notices to furloughed employees? We had to pivot rapidly.”

Basha Rubin, co-founder and chief executive of Priori Legal, a legal marketplace where in-house legal teams can find, hire, and manage talent, had also seen a shift in client behavior. She explained: “Before COVID, a substantial percentage of the requests we received were for commercial overflow support, the kind of rote work an in-house team doesn’t usually have time to manage. Now that work has dried up, we’ve seen a huge uptick in those new areas: employment, insurance, bankruptcy, and other forms of litigation. As tough as this time is, it’s a real opportunity to show the value of these kinds of solutions.”

Legal technology leaders are the nerve center for business-critical processes in law firms

Contract-review tool Kira has also transitioned to meet new demands. Noah Waisberg, Kira Systems’ co-founder and chief executive, said: “Early on, we got working on a different application: trying to turn Kira against internal documents. What do your contracts say about force majeure clauses? Or termination for convenience? Do you have those clauses in your contracts? We found that about 80 percent of contracts did have a force majeure clause, but only 15 percent of those included a pandemic among their list of triggering events. People realized that the details of your contracts really matter when you’re trying to shed expenses as quickly as possible, and we could use our technology to answer those questions. It turned out that March was our highest month ever for Kira usage in the cloud.

Ryan Alshak, co-founder and chief executive of Ping, which automates time-recording processes, noted that Ping had recently incorporated new tools such as Zoom into its automated time-monitoring. “If we’re going to track lawyers’ workflows and those workflows are changing, we have to be part of that change.”

Law firms are shifting their focus to saving money and saving jobs

The change in client demands reflected a change in focus, as law firms fought to stave off job losses and salary cuts. Heller said: “The immediate question from law firms was, ‘How can we use our technology to generate more business or reduce fees?’ Right now, for a firm to really consider legal technology in the first instance, legal tech companies need to make a case for how they’re going to either save the firm money or make more money for the firm. If you’re not doing one or the other, you won’t be taken very seriously.”

Alshak echoed that observation. He said: “The reason people want to buy our [timekeeping] product has changed. It’s no longer about increasing lawyers’ quality of life; now it’s strictly about how we can make more money. It never made sense that law firms routinely write off 5 to 10 percent of their profit due to the antiquated workflow of timekeeping. Now that money is restricted, there’s an urgency. You can either cut jobs or start to collect that time you’ve been leaving on the cutting-room floor. We had one AmLaw 50 firm that internally projected a $34 million revenue increase from using Ping. They based their salary reductions on that math.”

Working from home is better than expected for lawyers and law firms 

Despite the pressures of adapting to a new reality, our panelists had all been pleasantly surprised by how comfortable and productive they were while working from home. Rubin noted that the pandemic completely shifted the conversation about lawyers who work from home. She said: “There’s always been a little bit of bias against those attorneys who left BigLaw for a more flexible environment. Why couldn’t they hack it? There was a sense that you didn’t want your attorney working out of a home office. But now that we all have, it’s changed the discussion, because you can drive substantially more value remotely versus in a traditional firm setting.”

Waisberg concurred: “I’ve been surprised by how nice it’s been to be at home. I miss the serendipitous conversations that happen when you see people in person, but I’m really enjoying being with my family.”

Watch the full conversation here

As the old saying goes, “necessity is the mother of invention.” We see that at the moment, with the incredible innovation being borne out of the current pandemic. And it was also true during the financial crisis of 2008 – when a young digital marketing company called ExactTarget came through a failed IPO attempt during the market meltdown to ultimately achieve a $2.5bn sale in 2013.

Scott Dorsey, co-founder of ExactTarget, recalled the company’s 13-year journey to acquisition, the lessons he learned that are still relevant today, and the importance of his relationship with one of his key advisers: his lawyer.

Necessity is the mother of invention

“This is really an against-the-odds story,” smiled Dorsey. “It was in late 2000, the internet bubble had just burst, we were first time entrepreneurs, and we had three founders, none of whom was very technical. And we were going to start a software company in Indianapolis, Indiana – in a farming community called Greenfield.”

Dorsey’s lawyer Steve Humke, now chief managing partner of Ice Miller, was involved from the start, with Dorsey sketching out his idea to Steve on a napkin over lunch. “We really were bootstrap entrepreneurs back then,” remembered Dorsey. “Steve took a big chance on me. He said, I’ll work pro bono until you’re making money.” It would be nine months before Dorsey started to take a salary – and finally began paying his lawyer.

With cash in short supply, Dorsey and his co-founders were forced to be inventive. Unable to hire a sales team, they tapped into friends displaced due to the dotcom bubble bursting, and hired them as independent sale agents, on commission. The firm was already working with advertising agencies that needed tech to serve their customers. “That created a channel, to give us a lot more reach in the market,” explained Dorsey. “Those creative solutions would not have happened if we had been too comfortable, sitting on a lot of capital. And I see a lot of that kind of creativity coming out now,” he added.

“We really were bootstrap entrepreneurs back then”

With business growing, the company began feeling the pressure to go public, and it filed on December 15, 2007. Then the market collapsed. ExactTarget found itself with much of the regulatory burden of being listed, but without having raised any cash. It was a stressful time, but while it was unable to float, the company did attract the attention of two investors. In 2009, it finally pulled its stock market listing and raised capital through these investors instead. “It wasn’t a sign of failure, but of strength,” Dorsey reflected. “It was the best thing that happened to us. It gave us a much bigger vision.”

During the 2008 downturn, ExactTarget made a bold move to invest aggressively in growth, calculating that as everyone else was contracting, it could catch its competitors flat footed – and it worked. In the current crisis, Dorsey advises firms to keep a sharp eye on their pipeline, and how recession-proof they are. Just because others are cutting jobs, doesn’t mean you have to follow the crowd.

By 2012, the business had been scaling rapidly, and despite having been burned once, it was time to return to the public markets. This time the IPO succeeded, raising a cool $161.5m. “Thank goodness it didn’t work out the first time,” remarked Dorsey. “Because the second time, we were bigger, stronger, and more prepared. And we still have the extraordinary legal partners who had helped us every step of the way.”

Being marketers at heart, the firm – which had striking orange branding to reflect its vibrant culture – made a dramatic entrance onto the market. On its first day of trading, the floor of the New York Stock Exchange was carpeted in orange, and the traders wore branded orange jackets. Even the firm’s S-1 document was tangerine in hue.

With relentless expansion, the inevitable then happened. In 2013, ExactTarget was approached by a major player, Salesforce, which wanted to buy it – and a price was agreed at $2.5bn. Dorsey has now started a new venture, High Alpha, which invests in and supports new tech start-up companies. And he still uses the same lawyers.

Dorsey paid tribute to the crucial role of his legal advisers over the years, noting that legal counsel attended every ExactTarget board meeting, giving the lawyers “priceless context” and understanding of the business. The lawyers played a key role throughout – on the formation of the business; raising capital; filing to go public twice; making acquisitions; and ultimately, selling the business.

So what makes a great lawyer? “They need the technical legal skills, helping to give you great guidance legally, and as much clarity as possible. Also, being hyper-responsive and quick,” considered Dorsey.

“But above all, it’s about really understanding the business, and what it’s trying to accomplish. Being able to combine legal expertise with business acumen – that’s what makes a really good legal partner,” he asserted.

It is a partnership that has come a long way from some scribbled notes on a napkin 20 years ago.

Watch the full discussion here

The coronavirus pandemic has seen a seismic shift in the way legal professionals work. The serenity of a fully serviced office has been replaced by a home workspace that, for some, may simply be the corner of a noisy living room. Instead of the reassuring companionship of professional colleagues, lawyers are now more likely to be interrupted by a child tugging at the sleeve or a restless dog hankering to be walked.

Judi Flournoy, chief information officer at Kelly Drye & Warren, has had 500 colleagues working remotely during the pandemic. Many staff had a romanticized view of working from home, she said, “but the bloom came off the rose pretty quickly”, as they began to miss the camaraderie of the office and the random conversations that break up the day. She pointed out that when you work from home, the interaction tends to be much more “architected,” for example, through scheduled Zoom meetings. Her firm has now introduced virtual “social hours” for staff to chat more informally.

For working from home to succeed, the human aspect is just as important

Despite always working with remote staff, Joy Heath Rush, chief executive of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA), found they have still been affected by the pandemic. She explained: “Some of my team have worked from home for 15 years, but even they have seen fundamental changes. For instance, they’re not used to having a spouse at home, or children who are trying to learn, and using the internet. We have people who are facilitating webinars who are used to a quiet house and they don’t have that anymore. We’ve had to move around responsibilities within our organization to accommodate the way people are working now.”

The stress of working from home can build as time goes on. Rush observed: “Things that are novel in week one, are stressful in week four,” with people starting to complain about the number of “useless video calls” they have to take part in. As time goes on, lawyers working from home begin to crave routine. “They need to create some separation between work and home, particularly for people who have not worked remotely before and aren’t used to drawing those boundaries,” she said.

Despite the challenges, legal businesses can still do well in the current environment. Levine’s firm has been growing 10 percent each week during the pandemic restrictions, capitalizing on a new cultural shift by consumers, who have finally embraced the concept of consultations over Zoom.

Watch the full conversation here