Book Review of Eric Hunter's "The Sherlock Syndrome: Strategic Success through Big Data and the Darwinian Disruption"

Eric Hunter is a legal knowledge management colleague and recipient of ILTA’s 2010 Knowledge Management Champion Distinguished Peer and Innovative Member awards. He is Director of Knowledge, Innovation and Technology Strategies at Bradford & Barthel, LLP (a California law firm focused on worker’s compensation) and also Executive Director of the Spherical Models consultancy.

His wide-ranging report puts business analytics and the insights it offers at the core of wide-ranging potential changes in legal and other industries. Though future-oriented, it spends most of its time on developments whose beginnings are firmly entrenched, such as video search, wearable tech, big data, and data visualization.

Through my own work I have come to believe that legal organizations – and perhaps organizations in general – can obtain significant competitive advantage by leveraging analytics and technologies and taking better advantage of our increasing connectivity and ability to share inside and outside the organization. Hunter’s report provides more substantiation for those beliefs, and also projects ahead to suggest how to prepare for the increasingly rapid changes that are coming. I appreciate that Hunter is “walking the walk,” talking about increased sharing while doing so himself through this book and his many presentations at Ark and ILTA conferences (referenced throughout the report).

Sherlock Syndrome

The title’s “Sherlock Syndrome” concerns our increasing ability to observe, sense, cross-reference, and analyze information and trends much more comprehensively than before through data analytics and Big Data. The trend is one of massive increases in the ability to recall, analyze, and leverage information. Hunter posits that, at least with respect to personal preferences and search patterns, “everything is becoming predictable (and therefore marketable) through analytics.” Particularly striking to me is the thought that not only are the abundance of data and power of our computers increasing rapidly, but also the sophistication and availability of easy to use analytics tools are making this information actionable in ways that were never before possible.

I have seen this myself in my firm’s exploration of the Tableau data visualization tool. Business use-cases for Sherlockian advanced perceptions include forensic (criminal) investigations, insurance claim investigations, and, of course, targeted consumer advertising.

Darwinian Disruption

Hunter also believes that “Darwinian data disruption” is affecting the entire business world. It is not simply data—though the scope of data is increasing dramatically every year—but also computational and analytical capacity that is growing so dramatically. Hunter’s disruption is Darwinian because leveraging these changes provides a clear competitive advantage and those organizations and business leaders able to adapt to the new environment will survive. Businesses that cannot adapt to and take advantage of these technologies and changes may not survive. It may have been said many times before, but it is true: as Hunter observes with many examples, we are seeing accelerating levels of market disruptions as companies learn to innovate faster.

The (Edward) Snowden Effect

Hunter spends a good deal of time digging into the “Snowden” effect (not David Snowden the KM guru, but Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor). In Hunter’s view, Snowden’s revelations of widespread government capture of vast amounts of personal information in pursuit of national security encapsulate the inevitable tension among privacy, the right to share, and the (security and other) benefits of access to others’ information. Snowden demonstrated that cross-border information sharing is happening and will happen more and more. The NSA, US government agencies, and other governments that capture and share personal information are in his view just taking to an extreme and for different ends what corporations like Facebook and Google already do to target advertising to consumers.

The Predictive Orchestra

A skilled jazz and classical bass player, Hunter hits my sweet spot with an extended metaphor of a “predictive organization” as symphony orchestra, all playing from the same music and not simply following a leader, but also anticipating the melodies and entrances of other sections. (I would promote leaderless orchestras like New York’s Orpheus chamber ensemble http://www.orpheusnyc.com/ as a better fit for his progressive view than the hidebound, intensely hierarchical traditional symphony orchestra. For instance, in a traditional orchestra, the musicians within a section are positioned on the stage by rank according to purported ability!)

Legal Industry Impacts

Hunter does not neglect the implications of these much broader developments for the legal industry. Within law firms, Sherlockian advanced perceptions aid pricing, methods for doing legal work, internal communications, and understanding and addressing client needs. The new technology, analytics, and cross-border flow of information have the potential to greatly enhance law firms’ understanding of their clients and clients’ understanding of legal issues. The technologies increase the capacity for clients and firms to build “targeted relationships” and provide a continually expanding set of opportunities. And, the same data collection and predictive analytics that Facebook and Bing use to identify our consumer interests also identify our business needs. Analytics technologies can be applied directly to some types of legal issues, such as the likely extent of exposure from a given worker’s compensation claim.

Another example is law firms’ new ability to bring transparency to matter work, including data analytics around pricing and profitability, staffing models, and project models. Hunter spells out how the concept of “velocity billing” combines client-specific account managers, predictive analytics driving client- and firm-appropriate fee arrangements, and social collaboration around matter and client work has affected his firm. In combination, these processes and technologies lead to very efficient and client-targeted legal work.

Another instance of these technologies manifesting in law firms is his own firm’s adoption of Google Plus (“G+”). While much-maligned as the place where only Google employees “hang out,” Hunter sees G+ as a great example of a system that is both inward- and outward-facing and combines search with a designed social platform. Creating a G+ circle is the kind of fluid, effective, searcheable content and process management Hunter sees in the future of legal work. For Hunter’s firm, G+ is both an internal- and partially external-facing social network and platform. He notes that social network implementation and internal change management, like the pricing and client management projects he has had so much success with, involve different change management dynamics needing different approaches.

For law firms and the general corporate world, the technologies, techniques, analyses, and insights gained and shared so rapidly can be applied to not just readily quantifiable attributes of work such as hours, effort, and outcomes, but also leadership and change management at the levels of self, team, and organization as a whole. Hunter’s exhortations on leadership are very similar to what you might hear from many an Eastern-philosophy or martial arts- influenced business leadership book; what differs is the tie-in to his Sherlock/Darwin analysis.

Hunter suggests that people, teams, and organizations should be reinventing themselves through these enhanced perceptions and abilities every 18 months.

Complaints, Conclusions, and Inspirations

One concept that could have been more clearly elucidated is Hunter’s “spherical analysis/spherical modeling.” Google search suggests that these terms are not widely used in the business intelligence or data analytics communities—references to spherical analysis or models typically relate to variogram models that address how distance effects correlation between variables or a method of modeling magnetic forces (see the spherical models Wikipedia article.)

Much of the report is fairly abstract; I would not go to this book for an introduction to business analytics or Big Data. Nor was it entirely easy to read, with a fair amount of repetition and some extraneous quotes from Ghandi, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Hunter’s martial arts instructor. Finally, the size of the book’s print is too small (at no more than 10-point font) and somewhat faint. Perhaps the book is easier to read on-line (admittedly an appropriate production strategy given the book’s topic).

Overall, I found Hunter’s report an intriguing and inspiring application of broad industry, technology, analytics, and behavior trends to the ground level of the key interactions between law firms, legal work, and clients. His predictions about predictive analytics and more are in some cases not predictions at all; he shows how these can play out and have an impact on a legal practice area. They should not be ignored. I would not be at all surprised if many of his other predictions are soon borne out more broadly in our industry.

Boston Legal Innovation Meetup and "Tech-Enhanced Legal Services"

Last Thursday July 18^th I attended the 2^nd Boston Legal Innovation Meetup, hosted at the Suffolk University Law School and sponsored by that school’s Institute on Law Practice Technology and Innovation (“SILTI”). Adam Ziegler, former Goodwin Procter associate and now start-up innovator at Mootus, organized the event, titled “Tech-Enhanced Legal Services,” and featuring a broad range of experienced legal innovators. (Bob Ambrogi covered the first event).

I am pleased to see this series of meetings get organized, and am also very happy to see legal innovation / legal technology programs launched at two Boston-area law schools. In addition to the program at Suffolk, which started in the 2012-2013 academic year, my former Bingham McCutcheon colleague Dan Jackson is directing a program called “NuLawLab” at Northeastern School of Law. These programs join only slightly more established programs at Georgetown Law School (see the ILTA KM Blog on Iron Tech Lawyers) and at Columbia University, inter allia (Richard Granat identified 13 such programs in May 2013.)

My understanding is that Adam and the other organizers are looking for ideas for future meetups. Contact him at LawInno , the hashtag for the event going forward is #lawinno. 

The meeting showcased Andrew Perlman’s Google Glasses; document assembly expert Marc Lauritsen; document assembly vendor Terry Lee of Exari, and LawWithoutWalls Miami University professor Michele DeStefano. 

Google Glass At Work

The meeting started off an appropriately geeky note. SILTI’s leader Andrew Perlman demonstrated Google Glass, the mini-computer masquerading as a chunky pair of eyeglasses. Once the Bluetooth connection to the projector was set up he demonstrated voice commands, taking pictures, taking video, Googling the next Red Sox - Yankees game and Googling images of Niagara Falls. It also has built-in messaging and, appropriately for wearable computing, can provide turn by turn directions to Quincy Market.

He proposed several uses for this technology in legal academia. He'll be using it in his legal teaching by providing another way for students to ask questions.  He proposes that they could also be used in a legal clinic where the pretend client would wear Glass and record the law student taking the "client" interview. 

In legal practice, he suggests that another possible application would be to use it to record a deposition and have a Google Hangout going where other lawyers view the deposition and make suggestions through Glass, potentially saving client spend on lawyer travel.

The Document Assembly Landscape

Marc Lauritsen next spoke and gave a sweeping overview of the document assembly, automation, and management area, its past and future. Marc teaches "Lawyering in Age of Smart Machines" at SILTI and has his own document automation consulting operation, and is a very well-informed practitioner of this art.

Mr. Lauritsen analogized the recent history of document assembly to the "Cambrian Explosion" that led to a wild diversity of primitive marine life 500 million years ago. There was a comparable explosion of document automation companies over the last fifteen years; the market remains small in comparison to the market for legal technology generally, but has matured in terms of the number of players.

Document automation includes creation, analysis, and management of documents. Document creation includes power drafting and auto assembly.  Analysis might include disassembly of clauses within an document, or validation, or meaning extraction. Document management might include storage and tracking of the documents themselves, or of the legal obligations therein.

Mr. Lauritsen mentioned that the remaining document automation vendors cover a wide range of use-cases:

·         Content Bundles such as Smokeball (for small law firms)

·         Legal Services—LawHelp (there is huge latent demand for intelligent legal documents serving middle- and lower-income people).

·         Automated Legal Reasoning—Neota Logic

·         Document Analysis / Benchmarking—KM Standards

·         Software Management-style Document Assembly--CommonAccord

Going forward, Mr. Lauritsen suggested that there will be innovations in collaborative online drafting, with intermixture of freeform drafting and Q & A. Computers might suggest reuse of a clause, or might raise an alert when a drafter attempts to define a term already defined. The growth of interactive systems will change the nature of practice. (Ed.—his thoughts here reminded me of Kasparov's notes about computer-assisted chess, where amateurs working with three weak computer programs were able to beat grandmasters playing without computers as well as the most powerful chess-playing computers playing alone).

Are we free to code the law?

Mr. Lauritsen has recently written on the legal implications of online legal software. Should it be suppressible as the unauthorized practice of law?  Mr. Lauritsen has forcefully argued that it should not.

A Vendor’s Perspective On Document Automation

Terry Lee spoke about the development of a successful document automation company, Exari. While I knew that Exari is a serious competitor in the law firm document assembly market, I confess I was surprised at the extent to which its services have been adopted outside of legal organizations such as law firms, and at the major drivers for its adoption.

Exari started out in Australia, then it went to London; then the big banks realized they needed auditable ways to create documents.  They work with 15-20 of the largest firms, but their clients also include large banks which use Exari for onboarding documents and the like. The prime driver is auditability and control rather than efficiency (though it is more efficient).  Most of the time lawyers are involved, but the market has expanded well beyond law firms and legal organizations; They've automated non-disclosure agreements. 

A collaborative portal allows two people to work on a document at the same time.  There's been some talk about collaboration at the industry level. Exari is all .xml behind the scenes. It is all browser-based, with creation, editing, and approving documents all possible through iPads and the like.

Mr. Lee described a typical adoption process for Exari. It might start with in-house lawyers using the forms; then lawyers getting the people in the line of business to use the forms; then the line-of-business people getting the corporation's clients or vendors to fill out the forms. 

Document automation in smaller firms is often integrated with practice management software.  Exari doesn't itself provide practice management software or target smaller firms.

Exari has partnered with Vermont Law School to develop a course on how to use document automation; they've hired the first person to come out of that program. 

Who Should Innovate? Legal Practice vs. Legal Education vs. Legal Vendors

Prof. DeStefano founded the “LawWithoutWalls” program at the Miami University School of Law.  She has a very unusual background with a combination of non-legal advertising experience, legal practice, and academic excellence.

She suggested that legal educators and legal practitioners are blaming each other for the legal industries’ failure to innovate and meet clients’ 21^st century needs, with questions like “When are legal educators going to train young people to be 21st century lawyers?” and “When will practicing lawyers start to innovate?” Rather than mutual finger-pointing, she argues for cooperation between the academy and practitioners to develop young lawyers and legal technologies that will meet future needs. She calls for more permeability between law providers and law schools, and also law-related service providers like Exari.

An example of that permeability is her program’s partnership with the international “Magic Circle” firm Eversheds, where that firm provides funding and expertise and obtaining opportunities for its lawyers to work with legal innovators and law students. She believes that an LPO will likely partner with a law school. 

Despite vast and continuing improvements in technology, there will still be economic activities like litigation funding that people with law degrees will be able to do better than others. 

Prof. DeStafano acknowledges that we don’t know what the entire range of future legal careers will be. How can we train lawyers for jobs that haven't been created yet? She suggests that students need to learn higher-order skills such as cultural competency or creating a business plan through attempting them, though they may fail at first.

Networking & Next Event

As can happen at meetings with a lot of bright people from diverse backgrounds, the chance to chat in small groups afterwards was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the event. I talked to a former Microsoft in-house counsel (who was friends with my University of Michigan law school roommate), a solo practitioner who is moving into coaching startups on IP issues (and who blogs), Suffolk Law School deans, an experienced elder law attorney; and others.  My thanks to Suffolk for the generous donation of space and after-event food.

The next Boston Legal Innovation Meetup will be hosted by Northeastern School of Law on Wednesday September 11, 2013, and is titled “Legal Design: What Can Lawyers Lean From Design Thinking?” The event is public; simply obtain a meetup account and join the event (and group).