Reflections on the Innovations in Technology Conference
Some thoughts from attending the Legal Services Corporation “Innovations in Technology Conference”
Reg Reform
It was encouraging to have sessions on regulatory reform and the role it can and should play in justice access. I wasn’t at the conference in Portland last year, so I don’t honestly know if this is a new development for LSC, but encouraging nonetheless. Right now reg reform is innovation at the margins, and will probably continue to be for a while (“hey look a paralegal can answer legal questions inside this one county for this specific case type!”). I’ll take what I can get.
I think the bigger discussion is on how to marry regulatory reform to process reform, and we need the right players at the table for that one, such as the court clerks, the judges, and the law makers / rule makers. We need to have the “This meeting could have been an email” discussion on many, many levels.
Also, I’d point out that most regulatory reform folks seem to like putting all their eggs in just a few baskets. Lawyers have a weird fetish with impact litigation, especially around the First Amendment and UPL, and that’s ended up creating some very bad judicial opinions. There are more levers of change available, and we need to think politically if we want to get anything done. A good example is how the criminal justice reform movement found a way to be attractive to both conservatives (fiscal responsibility, common sense government, economic opportunity) and liberals (personal freedom, fix institutional biases, solve disparate impacts to communities of color). We need to think this way.
Maybe next time, but again, I’ll take what I can get..
Clio and Legal Aid
LegalServer has, for many years, been the predominant matter management system for legal aid organizations. To my knowledge, Pika and Justice Server (the other two options) are essentially end-of-life products, and must be self-hosted and self-supported. The “can we actually use cloud storage” debate has been de facto settled (it was kind of strange that it was a debate, TBH), since both LegalServer and Clio are cloud-based systems.
LegalServer has other advantages as well:
It has powerful reporting features that solve a very real pain point in grant management;
It’s built up a large amount of industry expertise by hiring people with legal aid experience and by simply serving the needs of the market for so long.
LegalServer has special features that are custom-built for legal aid needs, such as case transfers and eligibility calculators on intake, while these seem to be shoehorned into what Clio has right now.
Some regional funders have bought into LegalServer as a “package deal,” so that they’ve negotiated a group rate for the organizations they find to all use LegalServer - that’s very smart on both sides, but it creates a very high switching cost.
Another consideration: LegalServer is a non-profit built to specifically serve the legal aid sector, while Clio is a for-profit company. I’m not saying that being a for-profit company is per se bad, or that this sector should only use things built by non-profits. In fact most (if not all) legal aids make great use of products built by companies like Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and so forth. But I think it’s worth keeping in mind that for-profit companies, even if they have a nice mission statement, make decisions based on different motivations than non-profits.
The legal aid market is not large: there are probably less than 500 total organizations nation-wide that would make use of Clio. I think this is why Clio didn’t substantially enter this market until they got grant funding to incentivize them, and it also makes me think that the market forces aren’t going to drive much in the way of legal aid-specific innovations on Clio’s part. Clio is pretty good about regularly releasing new features that serve the solo and small-firm market - there’s a good bit of competition out there with RocketMatter, MyCase, Bill for Time, and so forth - so it pays to stay ahead of the curve there. But I wouldn’t count on a lot of legal aid-specific innovation after this first grant is done, that is, without another grant.
To be sure, with Clio there are many native integrations and features for serving small bill-by-the-hour firms that will also fit the needs of legal aids. My point is that I wouldn’t expect the same pace from Clio for legal-aid specific innovation.
It was interesting to find out that Clio did completely rethink the coupling of time entries and billing in their system when it came to the legal aid model. To me the biggest detractor to using Clio for legal aids was the system requirement that put billing and matter time entry front and center.
At the end of the day, I’m excited by Clio’s entry into the market because it’s overall a good product, and when products compete they get forced to innovate. There are still market forces in play that favor the incumbent (LegalServer), and switching costs are quite high from one system to another, but hopefully we’ll see innovation from both.
Document assembly / Forrester Research
The most “interesting” panel to me was the presentation by LSC and Forrester Research on the current document assembly landscape. I’m using scare quotes around the word “interesting” (I did it again) because when I say “interesting” (again!) I really mean the vibe felt openly hostile.
Anyway, from what I gathered from the presentation, the highlights were these:
There’s a justice gap;
We at Forrester are very smart;
LSC stopped seriously investing in document assembly platforms a while ago;
Legal aid document assembly solutions, when compared to those paid for and used by the Big Four, FinTech / TaxTech, and the AmLaw 100, haven’t shown the same pace of innovation;
This is the fault of the underfunded legal aids;
No, we didn’t talk to any actual users of the document assembly platforms that currently exist; and
Neither Forrester nor LSC presented solutions or recommendations to this, at least during this session.
Frankly this was presented in a very condescending way by the people Forrester sent. Telling the people in that room that there’s a justice gap like it’s something surprising, and then saying that they simply haven’t done enough innovating to solve it was really quite something to see.
It could have gone better, I think, if the same information on Forrester’s slides had been presented kind of like this:
“We at Forrester were brought in by LSC to evaluate the current state of document assembly for legal aid and self helpers. When we started our research, we weren’t familiar with the true scope of the need, and we were astonished to find that 93% (or whatever) of people with legal issues can’t afford to hire an attorney.
Document assembly platforms serve approximately X people per month. We see document assembly as satisfying a critical need, but there have historically been funding constraints that have not allowed the same pace of innovation seen in other technology sectors. We want to start the discussion of what it would take to build a ‘best of breed’ document assembly solution, either as an upgrade to the systems out there now, or as something new.”
And so forth. Other people will certainly have other perspectives.
I’m very curious to know what the endgame is here. Is LSC going to use what Forrester gave them (10-12ishhh powerpoint slides) to now go to Congress and say “look, the smart people at Forrester have concluded that, without some sort of funding incentive for next-generation document assembly, this justice gap is only going to get worse?” Maybe. It will certainly be “interesting” to see.
Errata
Some other thoughts:
Overall, every session I attended was informative and good.
Location was great - I’d never been to Phoenix, and while I’m convinced it’s “Upgraded Tallahassee,” and I mean that in a very good way.
The hotel staff was very professional and the food (for being conference food) was quite good.
Being at an in-person conference reminded me of just how much virtual conference suck, and how awful attending an in-person conference virtually is.
Really intrigued by the Forrester Research panel. I'll look myself but please let me know if their slides or a recording of the panel is available.