Google Law!

(thanks to thegioiseo.com)

It's happened. Google has entered the law business! Google has invested in Rocket Lawyer according to Forbes magazine which says Rocket Lawyer has 70,000 users a day. Paul Lippe also covers this at the New Normal.

I've been giving presentations for the past couple of years where I have always finished with a picture of Google's logo and said, "There's the world's next biggest law firm. Beat that if you can." It was usually met with disbelief.

Google analyzes information very well and law is information. At some level there will be the need for sophisticated interpretation via human thought but for how much longer?

First it was Tesco Law and now it's Google Law!

Rock on....

Google Law!

Mea COLPa and the Lawyer's Gone Bust...

(thank you)

Two separate items in Legal Futures raise concerns about lawyers and their relationships within their own firms and with their clients. They tell different sides of the same story, from inside and outside the law firm.

The first is that many firms haven't begun to train their staff in risk and compliance for when outcomes focussed regulation begins October. Yes, three months.

The second is that there has been a steep rise in compensation claims against solicitors. The figure is now over £200 million.

New figures from the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) said the value of the 1,952 open claims against the Solicitors Compensation Fund at the end of June was £205m, £76m more than at the same time in 2010, even though there were almost 1,000 more claims open then.

I wrote before that law firms are confused and perplexed by who should be their compliance officer for legal practice and what that officer ought to be doing. By October 2012 the COLP has to submit a report on the preceding year. That means having all the reporting and accounting systems in place now, or by October at the latest.

If law firms can't get their compliance act together then how are they going to respond to client complaints? How will they catch dishonest lawyers? Note that law firms have also to appoint a COFA (compliance officer for finance and administration) too. If these processes are fully functioning will clients have confidence?

Perhaps, instead of trying to kill off Rick Kordowski's Solicitors from Hell, the Law Society and Bar Council should be prompting their members to start thinking and acting to ensure clients are satisfied, well-served, and confident in the legal profession.

Adam Sampson, the Legal Ombudsman, wrote recently that customer service will be the key criterion

What is important here is the introduction of the concept of customer service as a basic standard against which barristerial actions are to be judged.  I know from my own experience that the vast majority of barristers take their responsibility to their client as their central, driving motivation.  However, there remain a small number of the profession who see customer service as something which is wholly the responsibility of the solicitor and therefore not a matter with which they need to concern themselves.  It is this small group who may struggle to adjust to the new reality.

Barristers, it seems, have not yet adjusted to a non-adversarial complaints system where they can "prove" their innocence. That will be only one part of the process.

Lawyers must realize that the new world of legal services won't wait for them to catch up from the 19th century to the 21st. We know other suppliers will jump in and begin to mop up. It might be Coop or it might be Quality Solicitors, but it won't be the lawyers who stand there with question marks over their heads. Whoever works out that consistently good service across all fronts to all clients improves business will win.

Mea COLPa and the Lawyer's Gone Bust...

Lawyers, the Comorra, and Dutch Auctions

(thanks to movieaddicts)

There's a scene in Gomorrah (about the Neopolitan Comorra) where dress-makers compete to win an haute couture contract for a major clothing designer. They are asked to bid for the work in money and time--the lowest amount for each. Pasquale pleads with his boss not to go below a certain number of days which of course he does to win the contract. It's a reverse auction. These are also known as Dutch auctions, in contrast to "normal" English auctions where the price ascends not declines (see Smith 1990: 120). Later in the film Pasquale sees Scarlett Johansson on TV wearing one of his dresses.

Dutch auctions are very desirable for buyers of services although not so good for the sellers. Lawyers are now finding out what it is like to be on the receiving end of a Dutch auction. With a hat tip to my friend, Peter Lederer, the Wall St Journal has run a fascinating article on the machinations of corporate counsel to impel lawyers and law firms to embrace reverse auctions. (Here's an alternative location if it's hiding behind Murdoch's paywall.)

Here's the opening:

Spurred on by budget pressures, companies' use of a controversial auction process to negotiate contracts with law firms has surged in recent years, a trend that could eventually reduce the revenue attorneys can expect to reap from clients.

Several big companies—including GlaxoSmithKline PLC, eBay Inc., Toyota Motor Corp. and Sun Microsystems—have used the tactic, known as reverse auctions or competitive bidding, to pressure law firms to lower prices, especially on high-volume work such as tax filings and intellectual-property transactions. Many lawyers now worry these auction-based pricing strategies are spreading to more complex projects.

"Is it making all of us uncomfortable? Yes. Especially when you start to move away from the more routine sort of work," says Toby Brown, the director of pricing at Vinson & Elkins LLP.

What is interesting is that this isn't being done through beauty parades and pitches but instead through websites where law firms bid against each other and against the clock. Sounds like a chess game, no?

Despite the tender feelings of law firms and lawyer that this might all be a bit infra dig--"not very professional is it, old chap?"--it's gathering pace and market share.

Ariba Inc., the maker of one of the main reverse-auction software tools, claims that around 40% of today's market for legal work—a threefold increase from just a few years ago—is contracted through electronic, online means, most of which involve a reverse auction, according to Sundar Kamakshisundaram, a marketing manager for the company.

And David Baumann, general counsel for TechNexxus LLC, which helps companies cut down on legal, technology and business-services costs, says more than a third of the work they do involves reverse auctions, about four times more than in 2008.

Lawyers will plead that their work is complex and varied and can't be priced like other products. It doesn't really wash when one sees investment banks pricing complicated deals every day. How many other suppliers are able to say, "I won't tell you the price now. Wait until I think I've done enough, then I'll let you know."
As one general counsel so aptly put it:

"Every lawyer will tell you that every piece of work they do is incredibly important and risky and has to be custom-made, and that's just nonsense," says Jeff Carr, FMC Technologies' general counsel. "No matter how legally brilliant you are, there is always an alternative."

What's the difference between a loaf of bread and a lawyer? You eat one and the other eats you.

*****************

Smith, Charles W. 1990, Auctions: The Social Construction of Value. California.

Lawyers, the Comorra, and Dutch Auctions

Waiting for Godot...or ABS?

October will pass without Alternative Business Structures and it looks likely it will be the end of the year before we see them, unless you are a licensed conveyancer that is. In part this is due to the way parliamentary business is done and also to the manner in which appeals against Solicitors Regulation Authority decisions will be conducted. There is also the vexed question of what criminal convictions have to be disclosed by potential investors in ABS.

I'm sure we'll get there in the end even if parts of the legal profession wish this would all go away.

I was struck by Dan Bindman's column on Legal Futures, "Are you an ABS optimist or pessimist?" It's worth reading for the views represented on the potential effects of ABS. Dan ultimately says,

One thing is certain: the new entrants will have little regard for broader notions of access to justice, or the social value of having an independent legal profession to police the three-way interface between the state, the market and the individual.

We don't know this of course. And Dave Edmonds, chair of the Legal Services Board, comments,

Dan Bindman’s article poses the right questions. But I quarrel strongly with his assertion that new entrants will “have little regard for broader notions of access to justice”. Why will they not? Many of the most ambitious and innovative lawyers operating in the present marketplace have a very high commitment to this fundamental cause. My belief is that extending the ability of citizens to secure affordable legal advice from new forms of law firms (which will be in the main run by lawyers and properly regulated by regulators for whom access to justice is an underlying principle) will enhance access to justice, not diminish it.

Read the other comments also--there's good stuff there.

When it comes to dynamic change the legal profession has always been in the vanguard of resistance. It's almost a reflex action. Legal aid was resisted when introduced in the 1940s. Then lawyers learned how it would benefit them. They love it now! But that's going.

Lawyers were opposed to neighbourhood law centres because they thought they would take away business. Instead they promoted it. Their funding is being cut now.

The legal profession has a good eye for resisting winners and on that basis I think they might be on to something with their opposition to ABS. Just don't leave too late...

Waiting for Godot...or ABS?

Is Solicitors from Hell a Conspiracy Against the Legal Profession?

(thanks to Byfield)

As I came out of the BBC yesterday with Des Hudson*, the chief executive of the Law Society, he said Rick Kordowski was a criminal. I reminded Des that the police didn't think so. He wasn't happy.

We'd both been invited to discuss Solicitors from Hell on Radio 4's You and Yours consumer affairs programme. For those of you who might not know Solicitors from Hell allows disaffected clients to write their stories about their dissatisfaction with their lawyers. At times the voices are plaintive, frustrated, and upset. A number of lawyers have sued Kordowski for defamation, except he's got no money. And recently a judge suggested the Law Society and the Bar Council take action against Kordowski and his website.

The BBC has put the story and the difference between Des and myself on their news website. You can listen to our discussion here: we are Chapter Three.

My view is quite simple. Whatever one thinks of Kordowski or his website, it serves a need. It demonstrates clearly that people need an outlet to express their feelings and concerns about how they are treated. Instead of attacking Solictors from Hell the Law Society should be doing something about those complaints. It should be preventing the need for a website like Solicitors from Hell. If there's no felt need, then no SfH.

Lawyers are improving their game--don't get me wrong--but far too slowly. In the first six months of setting up the new Legal Ombudsman received nearly 40,000 calls which turned into close to 4,000 complaints. And there is a backlog as well. But that's far too many complaints for a profession to have landing on its doorstep. It's still not an easy process to complain about bad legal services. It could involve the Ombudsman or it might the task of the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Certainly the Law Society website doesn't make clear about how to go about complaining except to give a link to the Legal Ombudsman. Take a look at its website home page and see how easy it is to locate the complaints section. It's not.

This is one of the reasons why government decided the professional bargain was no longer working and passed the Legal Services Act in 2007 and established an entirely new regime of regulators for the legal profession and legal services market. Professions have to be accountable to the public.

--------------------------------------

*Here's Des in a better mood and you can read previous posts on Solicitors from Hell from March, April, and June.

Is Solicitors from Hell a Conspiracy Against the Legal Profession?

82nd Session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance (15 July, 6-8pm, room 516, University of Westminster, 309 Regent St, London)

Dear all,

Have you ever wondered why the world monetary system walks the path it does, a segment of which we are living in? Do you ever wonder whether there is indeed an invisible hand that "puppets" the world's monetary system and certainly not behaving in the pattern of the famous Adam Smith's invisible hand? Theories of the "invisible hand" have famously circled the world for hundreds of years either as part of scientific argumentation (e.g. the human drivers) or conspiracy speculations (e.g. clans of new world order). However not so known to the ordinary man, but at the same time so intriguingly powerful, comes the speculative statement that such an invisible hand exists and it is called the Exchange Stabilisation Funds (ESF). With its unaccountable authority to no one else, except from the President and the Secretary of Treasury, its hand on the gold reserves of the United States, its institutional influence on the world monetary policy (IMF, World Bank) and its legal authority to "....provide financing to foreign governments", among others, it is difficult to be sceptical about the supremacy of such a hand. 

Congress created the ESF with profits from the nationalization of gold—and adjustment of the gold standard for the dollar—in the early 1930s. With the passage of the Gold Reserve Act, the government stash increased in value by $2.8 billion; most of that money was then diverted into a new fund to help the Treasury manage the exchange value of the U.S. dollar in times of crisis by buying and selling foreign currencies without congressional approval.

ESF funds are devoted not solely for foreign exchange. The secretary can, with the approval of the president, use the money to "deal in gold, foreign exchange, and other instruments of credit and securities." (i.e. ANYTHING on securities market) 

Some sources to further intrigue our curiosity:

http://www.slate.com/id/2200816/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_Stabilization_Fund

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj_lSydKB8M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ssrcD5GdPQ 

http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/international/ESF/Pages/esf-index.aspx

Afterwards can head for drinks at the beautiful bar at the Langham's hotel. See you tonight.

82nd Session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance (15 July, 6-8pm, room 516, University of Westminster, 309 Regent St, London)

80th Session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance (24 June, 6-8pm, room 516, University of Westminster, 309 Regent St, London)

Dear all, 

1. This is the third lecture by Joe to re-characterise and translate Hohfeld's analytical jurisprudence into an n-Categorical algebra.

2.  There are many symmetries embedded in Hohfeld's octonic discrete projective mapping which are really dual quatronic. In a previous lecture we showed how Hohfeld himself perhaps unconsciously missed perfecting his beautiful gem, indicating that he was not fully aware of the deep symmetries of his model.

3.  Is it not obvious that Hohfeld's 8 legal relations constitute a set? But sets tell us nothing of dynamic structures; they order but do not inform.

4. In the lecture, we explain how the 8 legal relations as jural opposites and jural correlatives relate to category theory. We dig even deeper and ask why this must be so.

5.  We show how the 8 legal relations are idempotent endomaps in the framework of jural opposites of a single human being, ie, in the monadic.

6. To map jural correlatives, however, we must use functors which are defined as morphisms which preserve in a one-for-one correspondence the objects and morphisms of two categories. Or, simply, a functor is a morphism between categories.

7.  One big result is that jural correlatives are not idempotent endomaps but rather isomorphic free and forgetful functors between categories of individuals (monads).

8. Not lazily resting on this discovery, we hypothesize (1) that systemic risk and the great cycles of default are left and right adjoints of pre- and post-default subsystems and together form a Dun Scotus-like fourfold cyclic symmetry; and (2) that short cuts through the great cycles of default via tinkering financial regulation only accelerates the centrifugal forces against the good.

See you soon, 

Rezi & Joe

80th Session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance (24 June, 6-8pm, room 516, University of Westminster, 309 Regent St, London)