How the legal profession can embrace the future

Globalization and digitization are fundamentally changing how legal services are consumed. Stakeholders are increasingly rejecting the traditional model of legal advice — led by general counsels and an army of lawyers — in favor of “New Law,” essentially legal business solutions, which take a more efficient and tactical approach to legal operations with a customer-centric, technology focused model. It’s a welcome fresh perspective needed to help the legal profession grow.

While there’s no single definition of New Law, it’s essentially a legal process outsourcing: it combines the use of technology with an alternative approach to providing legal advice in a standardized, structured, and scalable way. Just as the outsourcing of core human resources and finance work has enabled those functions to take a more strategic role within organizations, New Law can create space for legal functions to have greater impact by facilitating the management of standard legal functions and tasks.

Yet New Law today makes up just a minor portion of legal practice. That’s partly because its emergence is relatively recent, but also because the legal profession has historically been slow to embrace change. Today, the industry has an opportunity to proactively shape its development before the need to change is forced upon it. We believe many law firms will be able to find a new source of income and a new method of operating by collaborating closely with a variety of New Law practices, and knowing how to work effectively with the concept's underlying elements will play to their advantage.

Over time, the legal field is likely to reflect its clients and the general public: it will have wider socioeconomic and cultural diversity, and teams will need to be even more innovative, collaborative, and digital and data savvy. A customer-centric, connected workforce and technological solutions will all need to play a role in delivering accessible, inexpensive, on-demand legal services and goods that help solve problems and seize opportunities at the pace of industry and society.

Surviving and thriving in the digital era demands collaboration. That’s necessary due to the pace, complexity, and mobility of business as well as important global concerns that cannot be overcome by any one individual, firm, or stakeholder group. Businesses frequently work with joint venture partners from different sectors — why not deliver legal services this way? Large legal departments are starting to look toward integration that makes use of infrastructure, data exchanges, lowers the cost of legal services, and satisfies expanding cost reduction objectives. This is why New Law merits careful consideration: it’s how the legal-services industry can swiftly join and keep up with modern developments and the changing technological landscape.

New Law offering is becoming more and more popular on the market under the umbrella of legal business solutions. PwC Legal Center of Excellence in Poland has considerable practical experience in delivering New Law services such as Managed Legal Services. For example, we took a staged approach and used technology to streamline and boost the process for semi-automated commercial contract management when redesigning a global pharmaceutical giant’s procurement function. Lately, we have also structured and implemented a mass claim management process with respect to handling claims arising from CHF-denominated and indexed mortgage loan agreements for an international bank in Poland. Yet Managed Legal services as described above are only only one of the five pillars of PwC Polska New Law offering which also covers are also bulk and tech-enabled contract reviews and remediation, paperless solutions, LegalTech consulting and advisory on general business legal solutions for designing the Legal and Compliance Function of the Future and legal due diligence as well as delivering paperless projects as part of the ESG agenda (Environmental, Social and Governance).

There is no doubt the way clients use legal services is rapidly changing. Operating in a globalized world and across many legal and regulatory regimes means in-house legal or compliance teams face increased pressure from lawmakers and regulators. Together with the dynamic tech landscape and increasing volumes of data, lawyers can easily get tied up in high volumes of reactive work. Freeing up resources gives the organizations more time to focus on strategic planning, adding value to the firms and proactively looking to the future.

Cezary ?ela?nicki, PwC Legal Poland Managing Partner