Canadian Lawyer

28 O C T O B E R 2 0 1 5 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m T E C H S U P P O RT @k8simpson O P I N I O N There is much talk today in our industry of needing to centralize and automate legal workflows to achieve similar benefits. We are looking at so- called legal process improvement and legal project management to help us do this. There are frameworks and meth- odologies that have been borrowed and slightly adapted from the engineer- ing and manufacturing fields to help us do this. These frameworks give us approaches for identifying efficiencies and client value throughout a process. They also set out comprehensive steps to follow in unbundling workflows into specific activities that can then be planned and priced so we can deliver more predictability and transparency for our clients. I have been involved in LPI for some time, and I've been following the trends in legal automation with great interest — but it wasn't until I discovered the Robot Curve that I really made the con- nection between the two. Last December, I attended Rotman's Knowledge Conference. I'm a big fan of Roger Martin and his (as it was then) school of "design thinking for business minds." One of the speakers there, Marty Neumeier, of Liquid Agency, talked about innovation. One of his slides has always stuck with me: The Robot Curve. It's a "simple model of innovation that shows how new processes, businesses, and technologies continuously destroy old ones as they create new opportuni- ties for wealth." Imagine a waterfall curve with four key stages. At the top is "creative work," which maps to Richard Suss- kind's "bespoke work." It is original and unique. It's our trusted adviser work for which lawyers are paid for the decades of expertise they hold in their heads. n the 1990s, business process improvement, re-engineering, redesign, and automation (BPI, BPR, & BPA) were the big business buzzwords. The benefits gained in the '90s by organizations that undertook such transformational programs were not only about efficiency gains and cost reductions, however. As those of us in knowledge management know only too well, we increase accuracy and quality standards by creating forms, precedents, and checklists to support our services. Capturing all this process knowledge into documents also enables deeper learning and development capabilities for students and associ- ates taking on the work. By embedding the best practices from around the firm into more formal workflows we also create a higher rate of consistency to meet compliance and regulatory controls. And, if you add an automagical element into your process improvement initiatives, then you can add faster processing speeds and better governance overviews to your benefits mix, too. By Kate Simpson Swimming uphill on the Robot Curve: 5 lessons I The Robot Curve CREATIVE WORK UNIQUE IMAGINATIVE NON-ROUTINE AUTONOMOUS STANDARDIZED TALENT-DRIVEN PROFESSIONAL DIRECTED INTERCHANGEABLE ROUTINIZED OUTSOURCEABLE MANAGED ALGORITHMIC COMPUTERIZED EFFICIENT PURCHASED SKILLED WORK ROTE WORK ROBOTIC WORK

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