We had a great time presenting at LegalTech last year. At that time, many firms were coming to understand how document automation can be an important part of their technology suites. We had plenty of discussions about how Brighlteaf helps firms create efficiencies in document creation.

This year, we’re changing the conversation again. The Brightleaf platform now features Leaflets, which allow attorneys to create customized environments for their current and future clients. This means the clients get better service, and the attorneys get more work.

So we cordially invite you to visit us in Booth #432. And follow us on Twitter to get live-from-the-floor updates (look for hashtag #LTNY2012). We’ll show you how Brightleaf works. And how Brightleaf Leaflets can work for you.

Interesting post this week by Kevin O’Keefe at Real Lawyers Have Blogs.  Kevin posits that Flipboard, the fast-spreading social magazine publishing platform, should probably be the way that legal content creators syndicate their stuff out to their audiences.  His well-reasoned logic goes like this:

1. Flipboard has a clean, beautiful interface that its readers love.

2. Flipboard is already on 4.5 million iPads and just released an iPhone version

3. If a legal content provider wants to create its own publishing app, it will compete against Flipboard on points  #1 and #2.  And when it comes to an iPad user’s apportioning of screen space for icons, Flipboard is probably going to win.  Because that’s the reality of mobile apps (even mobile legal apps): you aren’t just competing for market share against your competitors; you’re competing for screen share against the hundreds of thousand of other apps that could be occupying your icon’s space.

As Brightleaf CEO Dan Gaffney has written in these pages, lawyers themselves increasingly need to use new technologies to connect with prospective and existing clients.  As they do, they’ll face a similar dilemna…should they try to distribute that content to clients and prospects using their homegrown websites and e-mail marketing systems?  Or should they try to leverage mobile apps that flexibly syndicate that content?

We have strong thoughts in this area.  Drop us a note if you have any questions or want to chat further.

A startup lawyer may be outside counsel for a company.  But that company tends not to have much legal work.  It will only do the legal work that it absolutely needs to.  It might not survive to create more legal work.  And its financial constraints mean it needs to pay as little money as possible for the scant legal services it does commission.

On the other side, the lawyer might be doing work for the venture capital or angel investor. The work is more regular, but the investor will almost always cap the costs its lawyer may assess. Plus, most investors have a roster of firms they can send work to if one objects to that cap.

Brightleaf does a lot of deep financial modeling at our client firms.  Much of that analysis shows that from a profitability perspective, lawyers doing VC deals actually lose money on those deals. This comes as no surprise to those lawyers, who routinely write off dozens of hours because they’ve blown past their cap.

So if it’s hard to profit from individual EC/VC matters and if EC clients evaporate quickly, and if you need to juggle a lot of these clients to keep revenues rolling in, why are so many quality lawyers in this space?

The reason is that they all want to win the “Lottery”.  Several startup lawyers we work with refer to startup clients as lottery tickets. They each hope that the startup becomes the next Zynga, or Facebook. They hope that one of their lottery tickets will need to go public someday, generating millions of dollars of billable work for their firm…if not for themselves.

So, if startups really are lottery tickets, it seems a good strategy for VC & EC lawyer would be to get as many “lottery tickets” as they can, thereby increasing their odds that one or more of their companies will make the big dance.

Easier said than done…for several reasons.  There’s fierce competition for these clients.  They don’t always seek out legal help when they should.  Their founders tend to be very smart, but very unsophisticated about selecting outside counsel. But the biggest problem for EC/VC lawyers is simply that it takes tremendous time and effort not only to hunt for startup business clients but also to provide (likely unprofitable) services to those clients.

It might sound overly simplified, but as competition increases, EC/VC lawyers who plan on thriving, or even surviving,  in this practice area for years to come are going to have to do two things.  First, they have to find ways to more easily gather these lottery tickets.  Second, they have to find ways to lower the time and cost of servicing these clients while providing even higher service levels to them.  The pressure to do so is likely to mount.  As margins continue to be squeezed at law firms, their CFOs will increasingly measure individual matter types from a profitability perspective…the way every other industry on the planet measures profitability by product line.  As CFOs visualize profitability by matter type, they start to squeeze or remove unprofitable practices. This puts the EC/VC practices right in the fiscal crosshairs.

How will EC/VC practices solve this dilemma?  How do they grow in this market over the long haul? How do they lower servicing times and costs while increasing service levels so they can win more business?  How do they out-compete new model firms and Rocket Lawyer style providers that crowd the sidelines of their fields?  How do they justify themselves in a climate that focuses more and more on profit?

Here’s what we see…They focus on using technology to make their practice much more efficient, significantly improving their margins and making unprofitable work profitable. They are employing technology to better market their services to new startups, connecting with those startups on their own turf. They leverage mobile devices to shorten the acquisition cycle of these new clients.

As the world of law firms continue to specialize, those practices that best leverage technology to differentiate themselves and connect with new clients and efficiently receive and complete work from all clients will ultimately have the biggest pile of lottery tickets. And having the biggest pile of tickets will always place them in the front of the line to collect their winnings.

Fast-forward to one day late in my Mom’s career.  (No…not the day she told an already mega-famous Jim Carrey, “They tell me you’re a comedian.  Good for you.  You’re such a polite young man; just stick with it and things will work out for your career.”  While true, that’s a story for another blog on another day).  I’m talking about the day she arrived in her office to find an alien device blinking soullessly on her beloved antique desk.  After regarding this intruder for a few minutes, she called Technical Services to determine its provenance and whether it posed any threat to her well-being.  She was informed, “Oh…didn’t you see the memo?  That’s your new computer.  We’re all going to be using them to keep track of our time from now on.”

I will leave aside any ironic comments about timekeeping being the first use law firms made of the greatest time-saving device ever invented.

Ever polite, Mom listened carefully to the voice from Technical Services as it extolled the virtues of the unwelcome newcomer.  Then she said, “Well…that’s lovely.  Thank you.  Now please come and take it away. I can’t see my rolltop desk because of it…And it’s blinking at me.”

Nothing against my Mom.  Got herself from a modest background through Vassar College and Yale Law School on scholarships.  Clerked at the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts.  Started at Ropes & Gray at a time when there was precious little support or opportunity for female attorneys.  Had five kids in six years, leaving the firm for a while in the middle of this run (but helping organize the Peace Corps during her “time off”). Then returned to work.  Then had a sixth kid. Then shortly thereafter, becoming the firm’s second female partner ever.  All the while doing a great job raising my five siblings, and a marginally okay job raising me.  So, y’know, hardly a woman afraid of challenge or change.  Just one who didn’t want a 20th-century device on her 19th-century desktop.

This mini-parable of the blinking-computer-on-the old-oaken-rolltop-desk always reminds me that no matter how accomplished or intellectually curious a person may be, once they get used to doing things a certain way, it becomes difficult to get them to change that way.  Actually, it turns out that the more accomplished a person is, the more pronounced their resistance to change may be.  ”I have been successful when I do X, therefore X is the way to be successful.”  This is hardly surprising.  Evolutionary biologists correlate the degree to which a species has adapted to its environment with the likelihood that species will “win” by out-competing neighbors for resources within that environment.  Whether you’re a finch in the Galapagos or an fifth-year at Goodwin, the more fundamentally you adjust to the rules your survival depends on, the more likely you are to survive.  Seems logical enough, right?  Finches and fifth-years who morph to fit in live to have baby finches and become sixth-years. 

Precisely because of their high level of adaptation to their environments, however, evolutionary “winners” find themselves especially susceptible to environmental change.  If a finch’s beak is perfectly adapted to crushing seeds, they’re in trouble when drought or disease or new competition remove their one food source.  When you succeed because you are so tied into doing things one way that works in your world, you tend to miss out on changes to that world…even fundamental changes that threaten survival.  There’s even a technical term used across a range of disciplines–hysteresis–that describes the state where the rate of change in some organism or entity lags behind the rate of change in the environmental factors that act upon that organism or entity.  

Lawyers tend not to be as up-to-date on their hysteresis analysis as they perhaps should be. But after a few years and with the benefit of perspective and the clarity of hindsight, even these firms come to see how short-sighted their “X is the way to be successful” refrains really were. If you were around when lawyers resisting the adoption of email, then you know what I mean. It wasn’t all that long ago that I was told by (former) outside counsel that they were afraid that email would lead to clients sending new matters to them at 4PM on a Friday afternoon. It’s hard today to imagine practicing without it.  (It’s also hard today to imagine wanting to prevent clients from sending new matters to you).

Which perhaps is why we were struck by yesterday’s almost-true news that the world’s last typewriter factory had closed its doors for good.  (We say “almost true” because it appears that Chinese and Indonesian factories still make a vestigially small number of typewriters.  But not, it seems, for long. 

Dinosaurs have been gone from this world for a very long time.  But they ruled it for a much, much longer period–sitting atop the food chain for a period of time about  100 million years longer than the period from their extinction until now.

The same concept holds for typewriters.  They seem like such distant anachronisms now, but they were the predominant means of law firm document production for–what?–seventy or eighty years?  And have now been gone  for maybe twenty? For decades, law firms couldn’t have imagined getting work done without typewriters.  Now they can’t imagine getting work done with them.

So, to honor the almost-dead typewriter, do this…Look around your desk–rolltop or otherwise.  Take a peek around your office.  Walk the halls a bit.  Look for all the pieces of technology you use everyday.  Now try to pick out the ones mostly likely to make you look back on in a few years, unable to remember how you ever got anything done with it around.  Fax machine?  Desk phone?  Desktop computer?  Laser printer?  The evolutionary clock is ticking on all of them. 

Except the coffeemaker.  If Darwin wants our coffeemaker, he can try to come down here and pry it from the hands of our Director of Product Design.

[Why are you still here?  You shouldn’t be here.  Go here instead.  C’mon…go…]

—————————————— 

Good.  They’re gone.  Let’s talk about Pulp Fiction until they get back.

You remember 1994’s Pulp Fiction,right?  By Quentin Tarantino? When it hit movieplex screens Pulp Fictionchanged how popular movies tell their stories.  Since the early Greek tragedians, popular storytelling in visual media was always structurally the same: events occured chronologically across a three or five act story arc while tensions built and then ultimately resolved.  You might get an occasional flashback (Godfather II), or an out-of-sequence coda (the burning Rosebud in Citizen Kane) or an onstage recitation of pivotal off-stage occurrences (“Sorry Hamlet…Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ain’t coming down for breakfast no more.  Time to move to plan B”).  Basically though, on stage or screen, plots and themes and characters always just progressed sequentially and in rigid lockstep with each other.  Beginning.  Middle.  End.  Always.  Why such predictability?  That’s basically the way we humans operate.  A formula for doing something just builds by inertia, accreting over the years and hardening to the point where it seldom gets challenged, even after it has long grown stale.

Quick side thought:  If this could happen in a the theater and movie industries, which are ostensibly built on originality and individualism, how might the forces of inertia and accretion stifle innovation in an industry built on adherence to precedent, observance of community standard, and strict avoidance of risk?  Hmmm…let’s put that thought aside for a bit.  Maybe we’ll think of just such an industry.

Pulp Fiction abruptly changed this rigidity.  In the film, events occur in almost random order.  Plotlines just barely interrelate. Characters die in one scene, and then appear in later scenes that chronologically took place earlier.  Basically, it’s a complete re-shuffling of the traditional movie structure.  But it works really well because when Tarantino tosses out the accreted form (sequence…sequence…beginning, middle, end…), he focuses instead on the underlying purpose: storytelling.  Because of this focus on story over form, and because of Tarantino’s skillful technique, the center holds: characters develop; plot strings come full circle, tensions rise and resolve, all with great poignancy and salience.  As NYT reviewer Janet Maslin noted at the time, “far from confusing his audience, Mr. Tarantino eventually makes the film’s time scheme crystal clear, linking episodes with dialogue that may sound casual but sticks indelibly in memory.”

One indelibly recurring nugget of such dialogue conveys much character growth.  Throughout the movie, Samuel L. Jackson’s hitman character, Jules, recites, and alludes to off-camera recitations of, Ezekiel’s emotional prophecy against the Philistines (Ezekiel 25:17).

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is The Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.”

As he profanely informs us towards the movie’s end (I won’t link to it, but if you search Youtube for some combination of the words Pulp-Fiction-Ending-Diner-Scene, you’ll find the scene pretty quickly), Jules is at something of an inflection point in his life when he drops his last Ezekiel 25:17 on us.  He’s been through a lot in the course of fulfilling his duties to his employer.  Now, he’s just going to walk the earth for a bit.  He doesn’t exactly know where he’ll end up or what he’ll do as he moves away from his previous role (a role he excelled at, by all accounts).  But he recognizes that he wants to guide others with what he has seen and learned. He’s trying real hard to be the shepherd.

And that’s really all I wanted to say about Pulp Fiction.  By rearranging the stale and accreted practices of his industry, Tarantino revitalized moviemaking, spawning scores of imitators and—for while anyway—making movies a bit less rigid and a bit more interesting.  He also makes us remember that it’s never really the existing structure that drives innovation, it’s the characters who emerge from that structure.

——————————————  

Oh.  You’re back.  See what we mean about Reliance on Counsel?  Someone who actually knows what they’re talking about writing succinctly and well about deep-rooted structural inefficiencies in the legal service delivery model. And then (wait for it….) actually suggesting solutions and offering to help.

Different, huh?  Better, right?  As we’ve noted before, too many legal blogs are thinly veiled attempts to get the reader to buy whatever legal service or technology the writer is peddling.

Baer isn’t selling anything. As Qwest General Counsel and Chief Administrative Officer he just quarterbacked the massive $20B M&A deal whereby his company got A’ed by and M’ed with CenturyTel without getting F’ed by the government. So, he’s sold enough for a few hundred lifetimes, thank you.

Because of the high-profile jobs he’s held, Rich has been in a unique position to observe how legal services can sometimes do disservice to the clients they’re supposed to serve.  Because of how well he did his last job, he probably has an audience that will listen to his suggestions about how these service providers need to adapt.  If he’s offering his help now in shepherding industry change, we should all be listening.

So, we encourage you to start reading and keep reading Reliance on Counsel.

Or we will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger.

Automatically draft all your deal documents at the same time!

If you’re a corporate lawyer whose life involves deal work for growing companies, chances are you’re intimately familiar with the National Venture Capital Association’s model legal documents.  This set of eight documents is immediately recognizable to most firms that practice in this space, and whether firms use the documents in their original form or modify them to suit their preferences, most would agree they are the gold standard for venture capital investment transactions.

The NVCA says these documents “are intended to reflect current practices and customs, and . . . one of our goals in drafting these documents is also to reflect “best practices” and avoid hidden legal traps.”  The documents contain explanatory footnotes and are widely believed to present a fair balance between VC- and company-favorable terms.  According to the NVCA, use of these documents is also intended to “reduce transaction costs and time.”

And that’s where we come in.  At Brightleaf, our goal is to bring intelligent document automation to lawyers everywhere.  For law firms, this means helping them respond to client demands for increased value and efficiency in the way they produce documents.  And the NVCA’s data shows that firms are producing a LOT of their documents.  Even in 2009, an admittedly slow year, law firms drafted documents for deals representing over $15 billion in venture capital investments.  And most people agree that the current production method for these documents is inefficient at best.  According to the NVCA, “our industry on a daily basis goes through an expensive and inefficient process of ‘re-inventing the flat tire.’”  The NVCA responded to this problem by drafting form legal documents everyone could use, and we’re taking the next logical step: automating the NVCA documents.

How did we do this?  Our team of experienced corporate lawyers reviewed and identified each of the substantive questions and structural possibilities in the NVCA documents.  They then used our Microsoft Word-based Template Factory to turn these documents into automated templates for law firms to use.  There was no programming involved and the process took days, not months.  The result?  With just a couple hours of training, lawyers can now log into Brightleaf and draft the NVCA financing documents in a way that’s more intelligent and efficient.  That makes the lawyers AND their clients happy.  And we think this is pretty exciting.

In the post above, Rees touched on something that’s very important to us:  Brightleaf is a document automation platform, not just a document assembly application.    While it’s easy for any company to claim this (especially if they’ve been reading our website), the term “document automation platform” has a very specific structural meaning.

Document automation platforms combine three main components:  

1. Applications (such as document assembly or document analysis or template creation) that automate repetitive, process-intensive legal work;
2. Process automation engines that enable collaboration and workflow and compliance by allowing documents to “go” where they’re supposed to, when they’re supposed to; and,
3. Powerful and secure database technologies that interconnect readily with existing systems so that clients have complete control over document privacy and retention.

Each of these components, by themselves, provides law firms and legal departments with huge value.  But by combining them, real document automation platforms can fundamentally transform efficiencies and economics at those departments and firms.

For more information, feel free to contact us anytime at info@brightleaf.com.

Even better, Entrepreneurship Talks will be hosted by Foley’s Gabor Garai and Brightleaf’s Dave Curran.  Gabor’s absolutely undoubtedly one of the best attorneys in Boston, and he speaks with clarity and insight about issues facing new businesses. Dave is a multi-talented business executive with deep and uniquely diverse experience in the business and law of growth-stage companies (and we’re not just saying that so he’ll be nice to us in the hallways).

It should be fascinating.  Be sure to sign up and listen in.

Each month, we get fewer and fewer questions from prospective clients about our SaaS delivery model.  Perhaps they recognize that Software-as-a-Service is no less (and in all likelihood, far more) secure than their existing systems. Or, perhaps the benefits and flexibility are outweighing the perceived concerns.  But it is palpably less of a concern to major law firms than it was several months ago.