Canadian Lawyer

w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m A p r i l 2 0 1 4 41 skyline full of office towers full of global brands making it an attractive market. "In essence, corporate drives the law firms' behaviour. They are all looking at their cousins in other jurisdictions and wondering how to reduce their legal costs. You either drive change or you receive instruction to change and it's pretty obvious to me that McCarthys are a long way ahead of the market in any of the jurisdictions we've operated in. Without a doubt they are two years ahead." The digital revolution has disrupted and decimated many industries, bring- ing print media to its knees and all but killing off industrial giants like Kodak. The legal sector is not immune to that impact because their corporate clients are also feeling the same pressures, he says. For LPOs the sweet spot is showing firms how technology can bring effi- ciency and cost control to their business, especially in automating contract pro- cessing. Once enlightened, he says, they come back for more. "For one global mining company we built software to monitor their legal work. They had 185 invoices a month with 1,800 data points. Without technology you can't monitor whether they were billed the correct amount. I'd say 70 per cent of the bills were wrong and let's just say they didn't bill too little." He says the legal services marketplace in the U.K. alone is worth $27 billion and the ice is just breaking: "You don't have to be a genius to work out that there are areas where delivery can be improved." There's also a bit of tech-phobia at play: "There is software in M&As, which has been around for 10 years or more, but only about 15 per cent of firms use it and then only because their clients forced them. It's not about being resistant to technology as much as not understanding what technology can do for them. The leaders in the law industry are very rarely tech savvy." Firms are being squeezed by clients and by falling barriers: Once a novelty, legal process outsourcing is now the new normal. Issues of quality control have fallen away as the market absorbs the lessons of experience. Questions around quality control are few and far between these days, Birer says, because most pro- spective clients simply ask for references. "Once you give them the references, it's the end of the discussion. We had to do that at the beginning but now it's a ques- tion of, 'What's your track record?'" The future will mean more change and resistance will prove futile. "Corporate is saying you can't tell me technology is not applicable in my marketplace or that you can't do things better or less expensively," says Holmes. "It used to be about fingers and keyboards, now it's about smart pro- viders saying here's a package of solutions we can put together either with a law firm or without. It's smoother, quicker and predictable, and more cost effective. It's not rocket science." Untitled-1 1 14-03-28 9:03 AM

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