Empower Your Legal Services Business with Digital Transformation Sales for Legal Services

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column welcome to digital transformation bite size this is a series where i interview thought leaders in the emerging technology space and we're talking about technologies like legal tech artificial intelligence intelligent automation blockchain you name it we like to cover it so that the audience can learn that little bit more about those technologies welcome to today's series thank you very much it's a pleasure to be here fantastic now for those folks who don't know you would you mind saying who you are and what you do because i've watched you online for the last couple of years and i've seen some amazing content coming out well thank you that's very kind of you to say uh so my name is colin levy i am very interested in the legal tech space so i often uh speak write and blog about legal tech and helping people understand what it is what it isn't and why they should care about it uh and i also serve as the director of marketing and business development for a company called warwick which is a uh professional editing tool for microsoft word and outlook that helps automate the editing of documents uh and i've used the tool quite a bit have been a big fan so it's been fun to now work for a company that makes a tool that i love colin for those who don't understand legal tech what is legal tech so that's a big question uh legal tech uh in my mind refers to two things one is it is a collection of tools that are aimed at helping lawyers perform uh better and be more productive um and those tools can include contract management tools matter management tools uh collaboration tools um litigation prediction tools uh but also legal tech refers to making better use of existing tools that you have such as microsoft word excel or outlook which are tools we all use but often don't use as effectively as we could and i would say the third thing about legal tech is legal tech also refers i think a growing community of people devoted to making the legal profession be one that is more client-centric and better attuned to the needs and demands of uh the current 21st century and how did you get into legal tech what was it that excited you about the space so i first got exposed to legal tech very early i don't think anyone kind of realized what i was being exposed to uh when i was working for a big firm prior to law school uh and in that role i was creating uh e-discovery databases using a variety of different tools uh and then when i got to law school i had no exposure to technology which kind of surprised me a little bit uh given i had worked with a lot of these tools prior to law school when i was expecting them to be at least talked about in some context uh in law school so when i graduated from law school was trying to find a job it occurred to me that surely there are other folks who like me thought it was odd that all this technology exists out there on the market and yet it's not really being talked about or discussed so i really want to learn more the way i did that initially was through reaching out to people who were actually kind of creating tools for lawyers or who were speaking and writing about technology as applied to the legal profession and that's really what sparked my passion was having these conversations with a lot of different people who then got me even more excited about it and wanting to learn more and then in your experience is it large law firms that invest in legal tech is it small firms can small firms use legal tech to compete with the big firms so i think that's kind of a common misnomer i think that legal tech can be used by any size of firm or a law department in fact i would say some of the more innovative and tech enabled uh firms often are the smaller or solo firms partly out of a frankly a need to simply just make money and they need to make ways to make their lives easier and spend their time more effectively so i would say that legal tech can be used in any number of different contexts and it's not restricted to simply one segment of the market is it a myth that big law firms move slow and small law firms move fast so i would say that that can often be the case but it's not always the case uh sometimes you can have a big firm that moves more quickly depending on their leadership and their desire to uh be more tech enabled and sometimes you can have smaller solo firms that don't move as quickly because they have too much work to do or are bogged down by other issues so i don't really think it's kind of a a matter of size necessarily that dictates how fast or how slow uh you move in the context of uh technology sometimes when we see law firms probably our impression is formed by what we see on television so episodes like suits or go back a bit ally mcbeal it comes across as very stuffy and confrontational is law the place or or legal firms the place that is an exciting place for technology professionals to actually go into or is it a stuffy backwater that should be avoided well uh first and foremost i would say that anything you see on tv relating to the law is likely not the reality however certainly there are a lot of elements i think of the profession that remain stuffy and stuck up and fold themselves uh and that is something that i certainly am resistant to as well as other folks uh and i think we're our voices are getting stronger uh when it comes to certainly technology um i think that there are a lot of um built-in sort of cultural biases and impediments i would say to the adoption of technology that are partly due to the fact that the legal profession has long sort of maintained almost religious adherence to its historical underpinnings which have traditionally been kind of this aggressive isolated um in you know group of individuals who uh kind of know it all can do it all and that really is not the reality on the ground i was going to ask you what is the reality in the ground this question when you think about law all laws tends to be based on precedent although there is law that unfolds and new rules are created but the vast majority is unprecedent so if you're a lawyer you're taught to learn technically to look backwards when we talk about digital transformation in the future work we're very much talking about moving forwards therefore are lawyers the right people to be running law firms and digitally transforming them that is a really great question and i would start off by saying that historically speaking lawyers are terrible business people partly because they're not trained to think in business terms uh and partly because they don't have the different skill sets that are required to work um as a as the leader of a business they're great at analyzing the law and applying legal concepts to issues but they're not so great at understanding the business concepts required to actually run a business i think that is changing and that partly i think is being driven by uh technology and technological advances i would also say that partly it is changing due to the fact that there are now uh people wanting to basically make legal education be more holistic and not just strictly focus on doctrine i've been a firm proponent of that movement and of that need to train lawyers and more than just doctrines so i do think that more and more uh lawyers will be better prepared to lead uh so-called digital transformation efforts uh but i think that we have a ways to go in terms of getting our ourselves uh in the right mindset and also having the right skills to do it uh but certainly progress is being made every day to that end you're a trained lawyer and you were a paralegal some time ago how has law changed since you were a paralegal not not that many years ago i'll not make you sound golden well i would say that the uh the law uh in terms of the the legal profession i think is becoming more and more uh focused uh on uh being client-centric and delivering better results for clients and in some cases being more apt to uh employ tech to do it uh than back when i first started as a lawyer and also back when i was a paralegal when really the paralegals were the one with the tech skills and the lawyers were the ones who were benefiting from the application of tech via the paralegals so i do think that is changing uh but i still think to some degree that uh a large number of the advancements in the legal tech space are at the hands of those who aren't necessarily lawyers but those who support and help lawyers uh with their work and getting things done maybe a tricky question the next one what did law school not teach you i didn't teach me a lot i actually posted about this uh recently uh law school i think at least my experience everyone's experience is different but from my experience it taught me doctrine doc taught me history taught me kind of some of the basics of different legal spaces taught me a little bit about legal writing in the context of litigation but much of what i now need and use as a lawyer i learned out in the field practicing and i don't think that really should be the case i think that law school should do a better job preparing lawyers to actually be lawyers and shouldn't have to rely on being trained by either the law firm that they worked at or the law department that they work in although traditionally that has been the case lawyers uh learned some of the basics of doctor uh basics of doctrinal law in law school and then go work for a firm and the firm provides that training at significant expense i would add um and and i feel like that model is outdated and is changing so how do we get people excited about the law and working in the legal technology sector so i would say to that question a number of things number one is just learn and listen and see what's happening out there in the space you're seeing a lot of clients i think making uh making moves to align themselves with lawyers and law firms that are more tech enabled and more apt to uh speak the language of business uh i would say that if you want to kind of get more involved in the space uh certainly there are a number of different folks who are leading efforts to educate and inform uh in that space and social media is a great place i think to find some of those folks especially linkedin and twitter uh where you often find folks like myself and others uh speaking about really i think interesting issues and helping to inform and inspire i would also say that frankly i think to be a lawyer in the 21st century requires some degree of technological knowledge and expertise and to that end uh 39 states in the u.s and hopefully more to come have adopted duty of tech competence meaning that lawyers are now required to have some awareness of the benefits and risks of relevant legal technology of course they don't necessarily define in the rule exactly what that means but certainly i think it indicates an a recognition of the fact that legal technology is not going away is something that all lawyers should have some basic awareness of i love it i have to say i've worked in law for 10 years and they were some of the best 10 years of my technology career colin i'm excited now by what you've told me today i do think there's a tremendous space for law and technology to go together it'll be interesting to see how the legal sector actually embraces technology i don't think they can avoid it maybe for numbers of years they have i think it's definitely a space for folks to get into i appreciate what you and the guys and girls are doing online in terms of spreading news about legal technology is there particular groups that you're a member of is there particular forums that you would recommend people follow should people follow you as well to find out that little bit more to move to the next step so selfishly i would i would say yes i would encourage people to follow me on twitter at sea levy underscore law or also on linkedin you can just find me by name i would also say uh visit my website colonesslevy.com in addition there are plenty of other sites that i think are worth visiting two of the foremost ones are law sites blog which is a great aggregating uh site of all the different happenings within the space and for sort of a more theoretical detailed approach i would say to considering some of the issues impacting the legal profession legal uh legal evolution is another site uh that that definitely is a good one to visit so there are plenty of resources out there uh and if anyone would love to get in touch with me uh feel free to do so and i'm happy to help them out with regards to finding their way within the legal tech space colin thank you for agreeing to be interviewed by digital transformation bite size today i do hope people follow you i've learned a tremendous amount over the last two years about legal technology by literally doing that thank you so much indeed i wish you every success in the future i'll see you online be good stay safe and i'll see you soon thank you so much it's been a pleasure