What does an innovative attorney look like?
If you’re picturing gadgets and TEDx stages and reinvention of the billable hour — sure. That innovative attorney is out there. But most look more like main street professionals than Silicon Valley visionaries.
Innovative attorneys and their firms invest in tools that help them solve their clients’ problems in new ways and consistently outperform the competition.
They are ready for anything. And since no person is an island, the innovative attorney has the tools at hand to practice effectively.
Innovative attorneys are indeed becoming more adept users of technology and getting more expert in their client businesses. And they continue to innovate to find better, more efficient, and powerful ways to deliver exceptional legal guidance.
Using analytics to build the best case strategy
While there is a tremendous amount of art to designing a case strategy, there’s a fair bit of science, too. Innovative attorneys understand that people often follow patterns. Judges and opposing counsel are no different.
Innovative attorneys look to data and analytics to understand which arguments are likely to sway a judge, which fact patterns move a jury, and what tells opposing counsel has.
Legal research and know-how tools can surface patterns in litigation and corporate law. For instance, Westlaw Edge’s Litigation Analytics provide relevant data-driven insights on judges, courts, damages, attorneys, law firms, and case types across the most practice areas. What’s Market Analytics from Practical Law presents market trends in commercial transactions. Attorneys can use these insights to craft a strategy that puts their clients in the best position during a transaction.
Using AI to stay ahead of opposing counsel and the judge
The most powerful legal tech innovations use at least some artificial intelligence. Where technology 1.0 simply digitized manual tasks, tools informed by machine learning take best practices learned from other peoples’ efforts and seamlessly apply them to what you’re working on.
So, what does that have to do with learning new legal skills? It means that you can have an army of experts informing your work — helping you understand an assignment quickly and applying insight that helps you move forward on your specific task.
Today’s more intuitive, user-friendly tools aspire to support an attorney’s workflow rather than forcing new processes or ways of thinking. And when you do update your process or way of thinking — the tools can support you rather than the other way around.
Using visualizations to communicate clearly with your clients
People are moved by stories and learn faster from images. Every data point has its unique set of stories, of course. New data visualization tools make it easy to show how each individual data point contributes to overall patterns and trends.
Visualization tools like What’s Market Analytics allow attorneys to analyze and share market trends and deal terms more quickly. With data-driven insights and visualizations, it makes a complex area easier to explain and for clients to understand.
Fill your firm with innovative attorneys
The attorney meeting with clients, doing solid research, and applying their legal expertise with the help of the right legal technology — that’s what an innovative attorney looks like. Those attorneys are doing it all with a lot of confidence because they know they’ve found the best way to solve client challenges and do great work.
Invest in creating innovative attorneys and give your firm a competitive edge.
