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.

In an AmLaw Daily interview several months ago, Seyfarth’s chairman, Steve Poor, attributed the firm’s performance to its clear-eyed recognition of fundamental flaws in the large-firm economic model and the anticipation of what might happen to that model should the rising revenue waters recede.  Poor stated, “Everyone loves rate-insensitive work,” he says. “But we realized several years ago: That model is fundamentally flawed. We realized a day like [the downturn] would come.”  Armed with that realization, the firm redoubled its efforts to provide more cost-effective services. 

At last week’s “Controlling Legal Costs” conference at Manhattan’s Harvard Club, Seyfarth stole the show with a stunning presentation by Boston-based partner Lisa Damon about the depths of its dedication to process improvement and cost-cutting through Lean Six Sigma methodologies.

Six Sigma process management, for those of you who haven’t encountered it, is a management philosophy that rigorously defines and measures and refines a business’s core processes and maps them back reiteratively to that business’s conceptualization of “success.”  As Damon put it, this type of thinking has traditionally been “anathema” to lawyers.  Lawyers have not been interested in process-based efficiencies, she noted, because we have made so much money from inefficiency.  The more inefficient a process is; the longer it takes.  The longer it takes; the more hours we bill the clients.  The more hours we bill the client; the more money we make…up to the point when the client fires us.

Probably true…but Seyfarth is through the looking glass now.  As part of their Lean Six Sigma implementation, their internal Green Belt teams precisely map out each discrete step in their standard processes (say, for example, filing a single-plaintiff employment lawsuit in New York) and then rigorously work to eliminate any unnecessary steps while smoothing the necessary ones.   Then they constantly re-examine and refine those process maps.

How is this working for the firm?  Damon reports unprecedented cost savings and sharp increases in customer satisfaction.  And the firm’s overall numbers show how economic robustness and resilence can grow from a focus on efficiency.

Now…if they added a little document automation platform into the mix, I wonder how much further they could go?

Lynne, a former Proskauer/ Brown Rudnick associate, is Brightleaf’s new Director of Client Strategic Processes.  She’ll be working with our large firm clients to help them automate the way they create and approve and manage their transaction documents and free themselves from the strictures of their exisiting economics.  Lynne’s previous life gave her an up-close look at the some of the labor-intensive sausage factory processes that corporate clients increasingly disfavor in their outside counsel.  Now she gets to help re-form those processes.

We’re fortunate to have Lynne on our side.  BigLaw’s loss is our gain…which is ultimately BigLaw’s gain too!.

Article here.

Full article here.

Sort these entries by date and you will note that, even now, seven months after his book’s publication date and four-plus months after his keynote speech at ABA Techshow, people are still writing — frequently — about Richard Susskind’s writing. Clearly, a nerve has been touched.

So, what’s in this haystack of opinion?  It’s a mix, really.  We’ve read more of them than we care to admit, and we’d sort the pile thusly: 

1. Mostly pro-Susskind, arguing, basically, that the legal profession fits the classic profiles for business model disruption and tipping-point accelerating change. Increasingly this is the dominant voice in the chorus.
2. Some anti-Susskind, which mostly goes like this: “Everything’s fine. Keep moving. Pay no attention to the Scotsman on the podium. There’s nothing to see here. Any downturn in the profession is proportionally and causally related to the downturn in the economy and no further structural issues need be considered. All is well. Remain calm.”
3. A few skirmishes between Group #1 and Group #2.
4. Assorted Anekāntavādan elephant-touching from the narrowly self-focused.

So, let us save you a little time and a lot of eye-strain.  Skip the other 3,918 entries and proceed directly to the needle in this particular haystack.  Michael Stern, from Cooley Godward’s Palo Alto office, writes as lucidly and crisply and cogently as you might expect from someone with a BA in English from Columbia, an MA in English from Cambridge, and a PhD in English from Yale. (Also, a JD from Berkeley).

Stern’s clearly a fan of Susskind’s thesis, if not his writing style.  Stern thoroughly analyzes and fully encapsulates “The End of Lawyers?” before pronouncing that the book’s predictions are “already emerging around us” and that we ignore them at our own peril.  Change is already here.  Lawyers can manage it or it will manage them.  But it’s not going away.

Okay.  Blog #3,921…you’re up.

A New Leaf.

Hello. Welcome to the Brightleaf blog. We’ll be using this space to share our thoughts on how well-considered process and technology solutions can address the challenges and frustrations faced by business lawyers as they provide legal services to their clients in the changing climate for those services. We hope you’ll check in regularly and share your thoughts with us.

Our premise is simple.

Most business lawyers – both in-house and outside — ply their legal services through the medium of documents. Presently, there is a growing disconnect between the producers and the consumers of these legal services.

If you’re on the “producer” side of legal services, you may discount the disconnect. You might relegate it to the junkpile as the latest iteration of stale lawyer jokes about outside counsel or glib comments about the Legal Department being the company’s “Business Prevention Division.” You might dismiss it as line-item expense griping in a down economy. You may argue that any such disconnect is overblown or that the increasing chatter about it in trade journals and legal blogs is merely a tempest in a teapot…more transient than trend, more client perception than market reality.

But the growing reality is that your clients’ perception is your reality…or will be soon.

What’s the disconnect? Basically, it’s this: the consumers like the producers and they like the product; they just don’t like the production.

Whether you work in a business law firm or a corporate legal department, your clients (external for the firms; internal for the departments) actually like you. A lot. They’re impressed by the knowledge you’ve amassed. They depend on the skills you’ve acquired. They’re desperate for the judgment you exercise on their behalf.

They even like your work. For the most part, your clients interact with your work through the medium of documents. The Legal Departments we speak with are very happy with the work (read: documents) that their outside counsel produces. And the corporate executives we speak with are very happy with the work that their Legal Departments produce.

So, why are they unhappy? Whose fault is the disconnect?

(With apologies to Cassius) At Brightleaf, we believe that the fault lies not in our lawyers, nor in their documents, but rather in the accreted processes that lie between our lawyers and those documents.

Those who consume the legal services that lawyers provide recognize that those services are necessarily a blend of incisiveness and artisanal skill on one hand (the stuff that we all went to law school to do) and repetitive, reiterative processing on the other hand (the stuff that none of us went to law school to do). Consumers actually don’t mind paying for the former. But much of the cost and risk and delay and consumer dissatisfaction surrounding the provision of legal services stems from the inability of the producers to tweeze apart the two types of work.

If you doubt this, try a simple time-motion experiment for yourself the next time you engage in some nugget of document-based work. Take out a notepad, place it next to your computer, and record every process step from the moment you open the task until the moment you close it. Every. Little. Step. When opening a document from (or saving it to) a repository, write a “C” in the margin for each click it takes you to complete that step. If you’re re-typing anything (a filename, an address, a previously used arbitration clause, a closing date that you typed yesterday and have to retype now) that was typed by anyone before, slap a “T” next to it. If you jump between applications, append a big “A” on that process line for each application you use. If you have to print or fax or scan something, drop a big “P’ next to a notation about how many pages and whether you had to leave your desk to complete this step. If you’re taking a step that defies description, like having to re-name a document because your counterparty decided to employ its own nomenclature mid-deal or desperately collating edits made by five people in five different mark-ups of the same document on five different days, draw a star or question mark or an appropriate abbreviation (WTF?) to mark your efforts. You get the idea.

When you’re done, if you’re like just about every other attorney who has performed this exercise, you’ll be stunned by how much of the stuff you didn’t go to law school for that you have to wade through in order to get to the stuff that you did go to law school for.

This is what Brightleaf was built for: to resolve the disconnecting processes that have accreted between the producers and consumers or legal services…the time-consuming stuff that neither your clients nor you (nor, for that matter, your family) are happy about.

See? Something everyone agrees on.