Changes in legal services are another of the many consequences of these turbulent times in which we find ourselves.
Nothing is more dangerous than the illusion of “novelty”, which is sometimes nothing more
Pierre Vilar
which is sometimes nothing more than ignorance of history.
The other day I read one of the many, I say without irony, with all due respect, articles on the “new legal services” that are appearing in these days of long and unpredictable confinement, then I read another and later another and I would not have stopped but for lack of time. My respects to those who have the courage to write -writing is always an act of courage, after all it is the only thing that in Saul Bellow’s opinion, “keeps me sane, bless him”- and to those who have ideas and are able to transmit them by all the means that technology offers us. If social networks and new forms of communication have any advantage, others will have, but let everyone choose their own, it is the ease with which we can communicate any thought, whether or not it reaches the category of idea, the proximity, the “exponentiality” that is the ability to reach an unimaginable number of people and, of course, the immediacy. None of this would seem to be open to criticism, quite the contrary. In fact, I would say that nothing should be criticizable in itself without a good dose of deliberation or better said, concern in the sense of “worrying about something” because Hobbes already said that “the use of reason requires some effort and work”. Criticism, when appropriate, must come after a long, sometimes very long, “conversation” with the object being criticized and a meditated reflection -although it may seem a lie, for many people reflections may not even be meditated- on the why and the wherefore.
Returning to the articles mentioned – I don’t know which word is more appropriate, let’s call it a “post” to be more in line with the new times – and which serve only as an example as I could have taken any other, in less than a page and a half we were told about such disparate things as “ Agile, Just in time, Kanban, Early adopter, Lean, Lean Startup, BigLaw, NewLaw y OldLaw, Online Dispute Resolution, ASP, Out of the box, customer centric, Production System” and I don’t know how many other things, all of them relevant, supposedly “labelable”, of exquisite Anglo-Saxon flavor and no doubt very relevant. But in short, what the authors were saying was that it was necessary to innovate and that those who did not innovate were left by the wayside and those who did succeeded and that those who were capable of innovating over those who had innovated succeeded doubly. The same had happened and would happen in the legal services, which were now at a crossroads between tradition and modernity (in fact the latter was not so explicitly stated, but it is a logical deduction from its content).
Sin duda, los autores tienen razón, es un discurso que viene de lejos solo que ahora revestido de digitalización y newTech, envuelto en una capa de urgencia debido a los nuevos tiempos y los cambios que estos nos van a obligar (“obligar” sin duda, pues los que habíamos querido cambiar o “reinventarse” como se dice ahora –se me perdonará, confío, este discreto conato de vanidad- ya lo habríamos hecho y seguramente desde hace bastante tiempo. Sea banal, sea oportunista, sea superficial, sea un grano más de arena en una playa hoy más que nunca desierta –también este escrito lo es, no vayamos a engañarnos- no deja de plantear temas que seguramente, con tiempo para mayor reflexión veremos abundantemente analizados en los próximos meses.
I have no doubt that legal services deserve a rethinking, as so many things do, and that as a service for a client also in permanent change, it has no choice but to adapt to this change and as far as possible to anticipate it, but more importantly to “feel” in permanent change. Change occurs when one “feels” that or “wants” to change because this, in addition to ensuring its survival in Darwin’s way, is the right thing to do. So simple and so forceful.
Those versed in “motivational interviewing”, an American practice quite developed in our country thanks to the courage of a few people dedicated to it, know that one only changes to the extent that one wants and decides to change and therefore, it is essential to find what motivates us to undertake this change. The reasons are usually multiple and so varied that it would be difficult, not to say useless, to make a list, however, the important thing is the will to change because, as I said, it is what must be done and because it is what one wants to do.
Legal services are changing, there is no doubt about it, they have been doing it for some time and each one of us must think about the reasons that induce us to change and where we want to get to with this change. The road is long and full of difficulties -we would only want it to be simple and “downhill”, something that, on the other hand, if that were the case, we would not have to care either- and above all full of uncertainties that despite the visionaries, or better, even with them, as Chillida said “nothing is predictable from the beginning to the end”. If the present is always confusing, imagine the future.
However, there are some things that will not change, that should not change, if anything they should be nuanced, no matter how much vision we put into the future of our profession. Allow me to mention some of them in no particular order, which in my opinion are fundamental: The search for legal certainty, the vocation to the client and the achievement of his best experience as such, the need to improve day by day in our advice to the client, responsibility and the generation of trust, the search for the best possible result -not the result by itself-, culture, in its widest and most diverse form, as a way of being and of presentation, openness of thought and of course, the legal outlook that should permeate, not impose, all our actions towards the client. Any objectivities? I hope so, although I still have some doubts…
