The legal profession can be a tricky business. Its rapid pace of change can be challenging. What worked one quarter may not work the next. This is especially true for lawyers in the innovation space. Law new is a term that has emerged to describe the changing nature of legal services and the ways in which firms are using them to benefit clients. It is a difficult concept to pin down, but it includes embracing technology, focusing on process and using non-traditional strategies that have not been a part of standard legal practice in the past.
Having the right mix of people in the legal function is essential to law new. The best teams will combine traditional legal practitioners with people who can bring fresh thinking to legal challenges. These people will include “legal techies,” process/project managers, business analysts and other allied legal professionals. This multidisciplinary team approach will provide legal departments with the tools to improve delivery of legal services to their internal/external customers, end-users and other stakeholders.
In addition to leveraging a well-rounded team, law new will embrace the ability to drive business value through data. This will require a culture of identifying, eradicating and mitigating risk, driving global business integration and providing real-time refresh and decision driving capability. This will enable the legal function and its enterprise colleagues to deliver greater value to the business by avoiding significant lost opportunity costs from protracted disputes, free-up management to focus on core objectives and produce better-informed risk assessments, risk mitigation and business decisions.
Legal buyers are demanding more from their legal functions. Those with the right mix of people, processes and technology are emerging as the winners in legal services. Those that do not adapt will face competitive erosion from those with the right legal talent, customer impact and experience. The emergence of law new will provide an opportunity for the legal industry to move beyond the mere introduction of technologies such as legal ops, e-discovery and ALSP’s. These changes are good delivery hygiene, but they lack the customer/end-user impact and enhanced experience that distinguishes a paradigm shift.
Local Law 13 of 2022
The bill would require NYC government agencies to notify employees and job applicants of the availability of federal and NYC student loan forgiveness programs. The Department of Citywide Administrative Services, in consultation with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, would prepare this notice. DCWP would make the notice available to NYC agency employees and job applicants on the Laws of the City website, NYC Government Online Catalogue, and other public access systems. The bill would take effect upon enactment.
