The Future of Law
Law new refers to ways that the legal industry delivers services in entirely new ways. This includes creating strategies that deliver greater value to business and society, or improving the experience of legal consumers. This may also involve working with underserved communities or developing innovative technologies.
It’s hard to know what the future of law will look like, but some characteristics are beginning to take shape. For example, collaboration and fluidity are increasingly necessary to meet the demands of business. Collaboration allows organizations to meet accelerating change and significant global challenges that cannot be mastered by a single person, function, enterprise, or stakeholder group.
For example, pharmaceutical companies routinely collaborate to develop products. In the legal world, a variety of collaboration mechanisms are being explored including joint ventures and managed service providers. These are enabling the delivery of more flexible, practical, and predictable solutions to what were once “bespoke” legal matters.
The future of law will include more integration across the legal supply chain. This will encompass leveraging technology platforms, erasing artificial, lawyer-created distinctions between provider sources (law firms and in-house legal departments), and creating more integrated legal operations that are customer impact driven and focused on outcomes. It will also involve integration with other business units and external vendors that can deliver specialized or niche expertise and capabilities.
This will require more data agility, a mastery of the core elements of data’s prime value: capture, unification, applied human and machine intelligence, visualization, real time refresh, decision driving, and global business integration. It will enable the legal function and its cross-functional enterprise colleagues to identify risk, mitigate and extinguish it, avoid the lost opportunity costs of protracted disputes, drive efficiencies through improved processes, and provide more accurate and timely information to the business.
For the legal industry to deliver law new, it must move beyond the incremental changes of the past fifteen years. These have produced improvements in legal delivery through established business process, technology, and multidisciplinary expertise (“non-lawyers”). This is good delivery hygiene but not a paradigm shift to more customer impact and enhanced experience.
A good illustration of the shift to law new is Trafalgar Law. Introduced to fans in the Sabaody Archipelago arc, Law has become one of the most important characters since the two-year time skip. He has grown tremendously and has been able to show off the amazing powers of his Devil Fruit, which allow him to create large ROOMS that he can control. Fans got to see these powers in action when Law took on Yonko Big Mom in Wano. In this fight, Law showcased a powerful new power that will help him bring closer to his dream of being an Emperor. This is a perfect example of how the power of law new is taking shape.
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