Who said this?
Likewise, technology can now drive and facilitate business development in a way it previously hasn’t – using data analytics to help firms best position themselves in a hyper-competitive environment.
A. A Y Combinator alumnus.
B. A successful entrepreneur in the legal space.
C. A person in charge of legal news and commentary.
D. A lawyer.
E. All of the above.
It was David Perla, the president of Bloomberg BNA Legal.
Bloomberg BNA Legal solutions combine trusted news and expert analysis with comprehensive business intelligence and cutting-edge technology.
If that doesn’t scare the crap out of you, you aren’t a lawyer. This isn’t the way lawyers speak, adopting the meaningless jargon of business to fudge one’s way through anything remotely resembling actual information. And if that’s the president of an enterprise that purports to provide legal news and commentary, even with a thick layer of tech cheerleading, comprehensibility will not be their foremost concern.
A chat with a guy who does marketing, despite his being a certified public accountant, about the intersection of legal marketing and technology, gave rise to some deeply suppressed thoughts of mine.
“Why,” he asked, “won’t lawyers see how technology can help them to attract clients? Why do [some] lawyers reject the benefits that digital marketing, search engine optimization offers?”
Tech start-ups are premised on such questions, and stupid money gets pumped into them in the hope that maybe they’ll catch fire and bring a spectacular return. In support of his hope, the proponents smear the internet, hold conferences, scare the crap out of hungry and clueless lawyers, into believing that there is magic out there.
Some will claim they are lawyers too, and that they’re getting filthy rich by using these three magic tricks. They may be lawyers in the “got’s my ticket” sense, but they don’t earn a living as lawyers. They earn a living selling you Amway for lawyers, because they failed as lawyers. No, they will cry, they did not fail. They just chose technology over law because it’s much more fun and fabulous. That may be, but they didn’t walk away from million dollar practices to pick rotten food out of trash cans.
They will tell you of the odd success story, and deny they ever heard of the 100 massive failures. Marketing dictates that you act happy and feign success in order to succeed. Even if your burn rate has left you penniless, sucking wind in vain desperation, you extoll your incredible success. After all, nobody wants to buy what losers are selling.
My chat with the marketer was mostly directed to assumptions about the practice of law that appeared totally reasonable and were fundamentally wrong. In turn, this made me think of another recent discussion (see, if I were trying to play the biz jargon game, I would use the word engagement rather than discussion, as the latter is old and comprehensible, while the former is cool and vague), in which a new legal tech start-up concept was thrown in my face.
What do you think?
I think the basic idea has some potential, but they’re doing it all wrong. They don’t get what lawyers do. They’ve identified a real problem, but theorized as to the solution. It’s dead as it is.
There was subsequent discussion, replete with empty jargon, and the question about what they need to “successfully bring it to market.” I demurred as to marketing, that not being my interest, but as to the efficacy of a tech idea with potential, I told them they needed to understand that their focus groups, analogies, surveys and circle jerk with a bunch of very smart, very clueless technologically adept people failed to grasp that they weren’t selling their ugly baby to themselves, but to lawyers. They didn’t get lawyers.
It was their turn to reply, thanking me for my “insight,” but that their limited resources were better spent devising a way to gain market traction than to make a product that served lawyers’ needs.
So why should I care? And really, who cares? In the weirdest of ways, I get what Perla is trying to say, hiding behind that empty rhetoric. Tech is here. Tech offers opportunities to help lawyers serve our clients better (though the cost-benefit analysis precludes most ideas from being worthwhile), and if we could get the people involved in tech to stop chatting amongst themselves and start learning what lawyers could use and why, maybe they could stop the cash burn and we could gain a benefit.
But they just can’t do it. They hate it when I call their baby ugly, because it’s beautiful to them, right up to the moment they crash and burn. By only chatting amongst their own, people who will rub their tummies in the hope of a sweet tummy rub in return, they can hide failure within a crowd of sympathetic liars.
And by this happening, we, the lawyers, are watching opportunity squandered. The products offered work poorly, if at all. They purport to solve a real problem, but fall short. They are too expensive for the meager benefit they offer. The visions of success are drowned in the cesspool of failure.
That these legal space tech entrepreneurs fail isn’t really my concern. Hey, if their VC money, sometimes tens of millions, wants to be flushed down the toilet, who am I to say they shouldn’t be allowed to blow it? But when doing so, they deprive lawyers of tools that could prove helpful, useful, productive, even if hardly disruptive, and we are poorer for it.
There is no Uber of law. The analogy fails on every level. So too do most of the cliché concepts like collaboration and crowdsourcing, which seem so Utopian, warm and fuzzy, yet fail to connect to what lawyers do. They can insist that lawyers fit into their paradigm, or fit their paradigm to lawyers.
Think Vista, which Microsoft decided was what we should love, and could ram down our throats to change us to fit its vision. And if you think Microsoft learned its lesson, you haven’t seen Windows 10.
When tech stops holding a never ending series of circle jerks, it may well make the practice of law better, more efficient, more effective. And it may even make a profit, beyond outsourcing scut work to India. But even when you explain this to them in plain language, they run screaming from the room.
Getting something right, that truly fulfills its promise and actually solves a problem without having to be wrapped in a thousand empty words of puffery, is very hard work. Field of Dreams, “if you build it, they will come,” was a movie. If they keep building square wheels and insisting that they’re great, we will never achieve the benefits tech might offer. Maybe someday, they will put more effort into making something that works rather than marketing whatever they’ve made.
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SHG the biggest mistake most highly trained marketers make is they don’t build what the market needs. They build what they think the market needs.
That is why CPAs ask questions about the mindset of the market. CPAs are professionals who learned how to dig deeper to find solutions to problems. It’s one of the many reasons CPAs make great marketers. 😉
I knew a CPA who was a really great dancer once. Same reason.
In the fast moving world of high tech,
First to market can cash the first check.
Thinking’s much too repetitive,
And never competitive.
This might fly, so let’s try! What the heck!
even with a thick lawyer of tech cheerleading
I first misread this as “a thick layer of” but then considered the thrust of the post and realized “a thick lawyer of” was exactly what you meant . “The dog took a dump on the sidewalk and now I have a thick lawyer of it on my shoe.”
If I had an award for the best way of letting me know of a typo, this would win hands down.
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I’ve found that the problem goes even deeper than that. As useful and easy to use (and free) as Wikipedia has been, Criminal Defense Wiki and Prosecutor’s Encyclopedia have both failed to take off. Criminal Defense Wiki looks mostly useless, like a collection of seminar projects by a well-meaning assistant professor. Prosecutor’s Encyclopedia has some great things, like transcripts of all sorts of expert witnesses, but it’s like pulling teeth to get anyone to go there (they’d rather email the NDAA listserv of however many thousand prosecutors).
Prosecutor’s Encyclopedia, at least, is exactly what these people have been asking for, with one-stop-shopping of videos, transcripts, and so on, but even having it on a silver platter, they’d rather do it the way they’ve always done it.
The theories underlying why all these things should be massive successes, adored and appreciated by all, and therefor worth a ton of stupid money, misses the one fact you point out. Lawyers don’t use it. If you can’t give it away for free, there is no chance anyone is going to pay for it.
And yet, those who come up with these ideas, and those who throw money at them, prefer to huddle amongst themselves, talk bullshit, and ignore the fact that they are doomed to fail. Rather than listen to anyone telling them otherwise, they shut their eyes tight and scream “lalala” at the top of their lungs, so no one can ruin their dreams of glory and riches.
There is often a fairly obvious explanation for why they don’t get traction, but to find it out, they would have to talk to real lawyers rather than fellow legal tech “entrepreneurs.” They don’t like talking to real lawyers because we make them sad.