When you allow yourself to ponder just how quickly technological advances have changed the daily life of a lawyer, it becomes pretty easy to speculate about just how foreign the daily life of a lawyer 10 years from now will be when compared to what it is today. When I stop to think about the fact that some of the biggest law firms in not just the United States, but the world, are directly involved in various efforts that will help reshape the landscape, it makes me wonder whether that actually makes it more likely, or less likely, to happen quicker than it might otherwise. I’m almost positive I don’t know the answer to that question at all, but I think it is worth asking and whatever the actual answer turns out to be should be interesting.
I’ve written about Dentons in the past but, at the time, focused only on their at-least-arguably-controversial-stance on conflicts of interest flowing (or not) from their organization as a Swiss verein. Despite its massive size as the globe’s largest law firm (or perhaps because of it), Dentons seems to be pretty heavily invested in a number of innovative efforts that have the potential to impact what the practice of law looks like in a few years.
There was an event in Nashville last month — a symposium at Vanderbilt Law School called Watson Esq. – Will Your Next Lawyer Be A Machine? focused on the current and potential role of artificial intelligence in the practice of law. I’ve also mentioned at least once before that I happen to be serving on a special committee of the Tennessee Bar Association focusing on the Evolving Legal Market. Several members of the special committee were able to attend, I was not among them. One of the topics that was discussed at length was Ross – Aaron Arruda with Ross Intelligence was a speaker, a particular artificial intelligence research product, that itself uses aspects of IBM’s Watson technology to try to be, for lack of a more sophisticated description, a robot attorney.. A subsidiary of Dentons, NextLaw Labs, has been reported as having been very involved in assisting with the training and development of Ross.
This week it was announced that an entirely different law firm, Baker Hostetler (an extremely large law firm compared to many but not when compared to Dentons — the Ross Intelligence press release includes the information that Baker Hostetler has 940 attorneys in 14 offices) announced that it had agreed to license the Ross AI product from Ross Intelligence for use in connection with segments of its bankruptcy practice. As the ABA Journal online piece explains, Ross really does sound like a scrappy young associate – one that is not at all concerned about work-life balance by the way:
Ross responds to lawyers’ questions in natural language by reading through the law, gathering evidence and drawing inferences. The program learns from the lawyers who use it to refine its search results. It also monitors the law and notifies users of new, relevant court decisions.
The other interesting piece of news involving (much more directly) the world’s largest law firm was its announcement that another of Dentons’ subsidiaries is jumping into the realm of lawyer referral services/referral networks. This story offers some explanation for what is intended. At some level, the NextLaw Global Referral Network could really be nothing more than just a variation on the affiliated law firm network concepts like Meritas or State Capital or ALFA — arrangements which have tried, with varying degrees of success, to leverage mutual interests of firms to encourage reciprocal referrals of work. The new Dentons-backed network attempts to distinguish its arrangement from other arrangements as being both free to join and not limited to one firm in a particular market.
The hook beyond just the sheer size of Dentons (it touts itself as having more than 7400 lawyers in more than 125 offices in 50+ countries and that Dentons already has 1000 firms it has referred matters to and 500 firms that have referred matters to it), although not elaborated upon in incredible detail in the ABA Journal story, seems to be the notion that something about its network will use “new technology that promotes reciprocal repeat referrals.”
I have no idea how that would actually work — or what that technology would have to encompass — the Dentons’ press release describes it as being a combination of transparency and an “algorithm,” but realistically it sounds like it would be the transparency and accompanying pressure — what the FAQs acknowledge as a “tracking system” — against “free riding,” that would do the trick.
Given the existence of rules like Tennessee’s RPC 7.2(c) prohibiting the giving of anything of value to someone in exchange for recommending or publicizing a lawyer’s services, actual outright agreements to engage in reciprocal referrals are viewed as prohibited conduct because the quid acts as something of value for the quo and vice versa.
Time will tell whether Dentons will, as the headline of its press release touts, actually “disrupt any pay to play legal referral industry.” The NextLaw network will have its own separate CEO and a dive into the Terms of Use of the network indicates that NextLaw Global Referral Network is itself organized as an LLC. (Presumably NextLaw Global Referral Network LLC is, like NextLaw Labs, a subsidiary of Dentons.)
From the press release, it also appears clear that while Dentons and firms like Baker Hostetler may find themselves licensing the same AI software from Ross Intelligence some day, Dentons is much less interested in firms of that size and scope being a part of this global referral network. The firms its looking for are:
primarily … small to mid-sized law firms, and firms of any size that are in one location, country or region, or that specialize in one practice area or industry sector.
A question I’d love to figure out the answer to is whether NextLaw Labs assistance in training and developing Ross also played a role in the development of whatever algorithm NextLaw Global Referral Network plans to use to encourage and increase repeated reciprocal referrals?
And, finally, although it is a round-about way to get there, the other topic a conversation like this brings me back around to is — when you are talking about giant law firms that already have subsidiaries that are pushing the notions of law-related services arrangements under RPC 5.7 to its very boundaries, how much actual difference would allowing outside investment in law firms really have on where the legal marketplace is headed?