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Open Justice may hold the recipe for a digital transformation of any legal team

Manuel Pueyo · Nov 6, 2021 ·

Next week I will be taking part in the event Nojember by Open Justice and hosted by Ulegalize in Charleroi Belgium. I will be taking part on Atelier Tech (Room 5 at 11:30 ) and the title of the workshop is Culture, practices and tools of the Digital Transformation of the Belgian Justice System.

I have been collaborating with Open Justice for a couple of years. They are, in my humble opinion, perfectly suited to talk about this because they are an example of an organization that is “digital”. And I will explain why I think they are “digital” in this blog post 🔑.

The question to define first is… What is a digital organization🤌? Digital is a way of doing things in our times of disruption(VUCA times or the Exponential Age). Digital about is applying the culture, practices, processes and technology of the Internet era to respond to people’s raised expectations.(Tom Loosemore)

Raised expectations? Private companies (and startups are specially good at this) are very fast adapting to digital and placing the needs of the users at the center. Users are getting used to excellent experiences in digital environments so they are going to be more and more demanding and pushing on public services (like a justice system) to adapt to those high standards.

So…In what ways is Open Justice a digital organization?

Open Justice is “Agile” in the way they start and move forward projects

“Agile” promotes short production cycles (sprints): when they have an idea of a project they are already making a small component, releasing it and testing early. This way they wont spend too much time making something that they quickly find out that is not useful, or that it has already been done.

Short term production processes with concrete objectives to build something big

OJ quickly release this small component to everybody inside and outside (via social networs) (even it’s not yet perfect) to gather people in the community who want to be involved.

Is your leadership aware of whatever is going to disrupt your sector?👓

Are you listening to what is happening outside your organization? 🐦 Open Justice has a #random channel in slack (intra company collaboration tool) in which community members share things that they find interesting , new tools, project or actors that are working in the same area as they work.

Break your “Bubbles”

Do you have a diverse network? 🐦🐒🦓 This is helpful for enlarged listening capabilities and this is something that clearly legal companies are strongly lagging behind. Lawyers tend to like to work with people that speak the same language. This often translate with lawyers only working or hiring other lawyers. This must change!

Being Digital means being open to re-examine (rethinking) your entire way of doing business.

3 things you could be thinking when thinking about your business model:

* Change work process. In many cases this rethinking involves crafting web applications that makes your services easier for you and better/faster for your customers —- optimize procedures and processes: become more competitive. reduce costs. Making it really easy to deal with government (do the hard work to make it simple), safely and securely.

* New complementary activities: La Poste in France is thinking about suggesting ensurance companies that their Postman can verify sinister, and grab judiciary declarations from people at their homes.

* Diversify: Start something completely new. In any case is the customer who will validate this value proposition. Do something completely different. Amazon is an example of that. 🗺️

Digital network business model

In order to do this Business model rethinking👆 Instead of asking what can I do for my clients I could rather ask What can my clients do for me? Your clients are people with capacities and you can involve them in doing tasks that may be taking your time and that they can do instead.

If you want them to engage in participation processes with you they need to believe in the larger vision. They need to believe in your why.

Open Justice has a clear vision and a clear “why”. And thanks to that , they get many people joining their monthly “Meetups”. Those participants they clearly want to help and sometimes they do amazing thing like adding lines of code or paying for lunch in our events🍲.

A digital mind institutionalizes cross-functional collaboration,

Cross-functional collaboration: Teams with different functions (Finances, Comms, legal operations, logistics) must improve the way they communicate.

Important to be transparent (open by default):

Data, information and knowledge should be shared as widely as possible within the Team👆 unless there are legal requirements or clear justifications for access to be restricted.

Tools that help for that

Use of digital tools to share info, engagement, excitement,enthusiasm to share what you know with others. What are you doing today? What are you working on? Share it on those places where informal discussions happen? Slack, Microsoft Teams, Matrix. In Open Justice’s Slack there is always someone saying hi and sharing what they are doing today.

Rethink your hierarchies

You have hierarchies and they are helpful sometimes: finding out who takes a decision on a hierarchical organization it is pretty straight forward. You need to find the person with an allocated company inside the organigram: if this person cannot decide he will pass the responsibility to the upper level.

From recent years another more agile and organic system for taking decision is taking place inside people’s organizations. Holacracy, Organisation Liberee, Meritocracy is the one we are going to talk today because it is a way to flexible hierarchy and it can be put in practice as of today.

Meritocracy: those people who have earned peers respect over time drive decisions: everyone has the right to speak and access to the kinds of tools that ensure your voice is heard but not everyone is listened to equally.To become a leader in a meritocracy you need to attract followers first, not the other way around, First title then followers.

In Open Justice forums there is a say: code talk. Those that produce better code or are better at finding solutions to bugs they are the one who earn inmost influence. The path is that of quality over quantity.

If you are high in hierarchy in an organization the key for you is to identify those “de facto” leaders and get them to support your decisions.

Data

A digital organization is one that understands the value of the data they are managing and generating.

One of the big opportunity coming from this, is a better knowledge about your client. In order to be more relevant your are going to need to be more targeted. You are going to need to be able to be able to capture, organize and understand all this data in order to turn it into information about the needs of your client at the right time and in a very targeted way.

Technology: APIS are everywhere

A smart use of technology plays an essential role in the digital transformation process

What is happening is that computers are getting more powerful. The costs of data storage are going down and also the costs of developing software.

Sometimes this innovation does not need to come from your own team. But you can look for resources outside: you put your data , applications or devices outside and open it up to teams outside to improve it. You can create or join an application network and let others to build on top.

A good example of how open justice is using technology is by creating an API, An API is a set of code that has been written to ensure interoperability with other systems. Omdat has an API at the core, this means that any outside developper can use the case law database from OMdat and create a different web app with this data.

People: Never put them last 🙂

The flexible workspace

Trust your people to work wherever they want and give them resources and facilities to excel.

The human workspace

Define and communicate a culture inside your team that is based on common values.

Conclusion

In this article I wanted to point out some areas organizations may be working on if they would like to become more digitally mature. I am really looking forward to the atelier to discuss these and other points with participants. I will be taking part on Atelier Tech (Room 5 at 11:30 ) and the title of the workshop is Culture, practices and tools of the Digital Transformation of the Belgian Justice System. Don’t hesitate to come and say Hi😀✋.

Let’s get SEOrious : why law firms should consider SEO to grow their client portfolio and build a better legal Internet

Manuel Pueyo · Oct 25, 2021 ·

I want to convince you that if you are a law firm with at least 10 lawyers in your team, you need to be doing SEO right now💎.

I’m not going to give you a definition of SEO because there are many out there ( you should check SEO gurus like ahrefs, yoast, moz, screaming frog) .

For me, doing SEO is like dancing with Google🕺🏼: You are creating content and helping Google achieve it’s mission. If you do that, Google is going to treat you well and give you rewards🎁.

What is Google’s mission? At it’s core, they have to understand language. Their job is to figure out what people are searching for and surface helpful information from the web, no matter how they spell or combine the words in their query.

The E in SEO stands for Experience

Originally SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. For me doing SEO is less about search “Engine” and more about search “Experience”. That places the focus less on pleasing the machine and more on pleasing the human who is searching for information. The closest your piece of content is to you user’s human needs and their context, the higher your chances are of getting good results.

Doing SEO is using “digital” to accomplish part of your mission as a lawyer

According to the UN basic principles on the role of lawyers, one of their key roles is advising clients as to their legal rights and obligations, and as to the working of the legal system. Yes! One big part of the mission of the lawyer is to clarify information, to give information.. and now guess where are people looking for information today🤔? It’s Bing, DuckDuck, Yandex, and of course the big Google.

I was yesterday talking to an “artist” friend of mine who did not know if she had to declare their income coming from an airbnb listing to the tax authorities in Belgium. She clearly had a legal question but she was lost and did not know who she was supposed to ask. I said, why don’t you “Google it”? She said she did, but she got different pages saying different things about it. No page in the search results was tailored enough with an answer adapted to her life situation. This could be a content creation opportunity for law firms.

Let’s face it. It’s year 2021, if not you, somebody else is going to be doing it, somebody else is going to try to disrupt your market. The risk of not doing this as a lawyer is that there is an increasing number of actors with commercial interests (startups) that are not registered in a Bar, they don’t have same ethical standards as lawyers do, and they are writing content on the web solving legal issues. I know from direct sources that Bar registered lawyers are very worried about their market being disrupted by actors outside the Bar. I would advice them to stop worrying and start using digital to accomplish their mission as a lawyer.

Doing SEO as a lawyer who writes for the web

Web is a different medium. When you write your texts for the web you need to plan them, write them and display them in a different way.

Doing SEO is breaking up long texts and writing only what your user needs. Think about “micro questions” or “micro moments”, somebody out there has a burning legal question:

Is it legal to make vaccines a workplace obligation?

Think about my friend Ana who is an unemployed artist and does not know if she has to pay taxes for her Airbnb listing.

I know this is difficult because you have been trained to write differently but try to write a post that answers only that. And remove superfluous words or ideas that do not serve that purpose.

I am going to show you a bad example, but not to blame the author. On the contrary, I recognize the great work this law firm is doing with their content:

I think this article in french is a bad example for SEO, what they say is comprehensive and probably right in their analysis, but looks more like a report or memo: there are too many questions answered in this post. basically you need to break this article in 5 or 6 mini articles that answer smaller questions.

Doing SEO strengthen some good muscles💪

User centric muscles

It forces you to question if your service is good and to change adapt it to what your users need at each moment. More on this in this article

Mind clarity & information organization muscles

SEO forces you to think about having a clear mission for your website’s content and, as a side effect, also your law firm mission.

But you also need to have a structured website, with good schema markup language that makes sense to robots who are trying to understand what your website is about.

Collaboration muscles

Another good “thing” coming from SEO is that is will improve your collaboration skills. You need to go out there and connect with other legal actors that have websites in your semantic area. You need to find ways so that they link to your site. Those are “back links” and they will improve your SEO results.

I hope I managed to give you some good reasons on why should start being a much more SEOrious lawyer.

Get in touch with us if you would like to start creating SEO optimized content for your website ➡️ Sign up to our newsletter and you will get an email every month on things around the legal transformation of the legal sector.

Law firm website content: an interesting way to get closer to your ideal client

Manuel Pueyo · Aug 17, 2021 ·

Digital is not a thing. It’s a way of doing things. Websites are not goods. It’s not like a ping-pong table🏓, you pay, you put it on your office and the project is done. When you decide to get a website going you are starting a system in which you put a set of actors and tools in continuous motion. This means, there is a beginning but there is not an end to the project.

I see a lot of law firms creating beautiful websites, but poor on content . It looks like they want a vitrine, a showcase🗿 but they don’t want to embrace web technology as a storage of value and as an enabler of a good legal service. They buy websites like they buy ping-pong tables, they don’t want to get their best actors involved in content creation.

As a lawyer you need to understand that if you are not currently creating content you are missing an opportunity to get closer to your ideal clients and ensure your law firm will be relevant in the next 10 years.

What is law firm website content ?

Law firm website content is about giving your legal knowledge a new home🏠. A new place where to live, travel and connect with the outside world.

Your lawyers know about many aspects of the law, it’s application in courts and tribunals, and tips on how to apply it in real life. This knowledge should not be kept for the coffee conversations with your other lawyer colleagues.

When you write it or draw it, when you record it in audiovisual format and you upload it on the web it’s called content. And content flies.

Since this is valuable, you want to store that knowledge in a house you own, organize it under your own rules, not only in third party silos you can’t control (LinkedIn, Facebook,etc).

The web is a place you can use to, safely and securely, store this valuable knowledge. The content is a storage of your value as a lawyer.

Why is it a good moment for law firms to start creating content?

There are many reasons in August 2021 for law firms to start taking seriously content creation

Content creation strengthens your user centric muscles 🧠

At the top of the agenda of law firms today is improving their legal service. This could be done by applying legal design which is the application of service design to the legal field.

But lawyers are not designers. They have never been trained so that they have to learn it in the flow of work. Content creation can be a good start to be thinking like a designer by writing as a designer.

When you think like a designer one of your top priorities is to ensure that what you do serves a function, it solves a problem of someone out there. Good content solves a problem and fulfil the intent of what your users are seeking is the only way to go.

Google is promoting more than ever good content

Google also wants you to think like a designer. With machine learning and neuro linguistic programming (NLP), Google computers are getting really good at understanding what is the intent behind people’s searches. What is the problem they have? Finding the solution is Google’s job, and for you as content creator there is no shortcut but to deliver solutions to your clients.

Legal systems are under stronger pressure to deliver accessible text in a simple language

States are far from being able to deliver that promise of legal text that is more accessible. It’s going to be the job of the lawyer to actually make that transition from complex to simple (accessible) so that their citizens can “consume” the law. Web content is not the only, one but a good place to start that transition.

Rise of self-service models for law

By 2030 ‘everyone has a “free” lawyer at their disposal, similar to Siri’. Selfservice models will have a huge impact on the market. This is already visible today, look at the LegalZoom IPO and recent funding for RocketLawyer. By creating “structured” content placing your knowledge in accessible web format you are starting to create future proof content that can be flexible and adapted to any future apps and tools.

Good content accelerates your digital transformation

When you decide to get a website you are starting a system in which you put a set of actors and tools in continuous motion. Content needs a production rhythm. A good flow.

When you start to regularly create content for the web you need to put in place team processes: an editorial production workflow that is going to , hopefully, make your team question, in a positive way, how you are all working together. You are going to need to adopt new digital tools and practices and this challenge is going to accelerate your team digital transformation maturity.

And remember this

Awareness: more eyeballs on your law firm

Finally, it is a good moment to create content if you want your brand to be more visible. You can read this amazing story of a Scandinavian law firm that started to create content and increased the visitor of their website by 600%.

How to create content ?

Content is hard work. It’s political. It requires vision alignment with your partners. It involves decision making at different levels inside the organization. It requires an orchestration of tools, people and processes working in line as an editorial factory🏭. This is the discipline called content operations.

We suggest involving every department in the content creation process: since the best content is the one who solves a need from your client, you need to hear specially from the departments that are closer to the client what are the clients expectations and problems. But this is not something they are used to do : your lawyers don’t think in terms of content opportunities. You are going to need to change some habits.

Include different profiles, involve a coach: it often takes two people to write a good piece of content. Why is that? Because your lawyers they need practice to get to write an article that is free from jargon and written for online readers 👀💻.

Improve your human listening capabilities💙. Pains and problems are not always rational. Sometimes you need to train your lawyers to listen with the heart not only with the mind.

To summarize I repeat again the same key message:

It is surprising to see how many law firms are neglecting the opportunity to grow by creating content. Don’t miss this train! content will get closer to your ideal clients and move your law firm towards modernity.

Best Attorney marketing strategies: A method to find what works

Manuel Pueyo · May 26, 2021 ·

Miguel works for a law firm that employs 10 lawyers. He has been tasked to run communications on behalf of his firm. During team brainstorming sessions they often come up with many new marketing ideas. 🤯

Although this is nice and he feels energized after each brainstorming session, the challenge he faces most of the time is that these ideas end up not being implemented. When he presents a concrete plan to invest time and money in one of those ideas, there is rarely a green light from the board. There is always an excuse to delay the action for another time.

One cause of this problem is the natural governance process inside law firms having many partners in the top (not a single boss) & thus having different views on how to communicate and do business development.

I somehow empathize with Miguel’s law firm, I understand the situation. In today’s volatile and uncertain world it is really difficult to choose an appropriate communication channel or strategy. It’s a tough decision. This post is about helping you to make the decision making process a bit less difficult, based less on intuition, but rather on data.

Try to be different

I was once told by the Eubelius‘ head of communication that when it comes to law firms’ communication, they are all copying each other = They lack creativity.

This is the opposite of what you should be doing. You should start thinking about true difference – finding the tactics and spaces where not some many firms are yet present.

my daughters t-shirt has the answer — My daughters t-shirt has the answer

Looking at that empty white spot might give you a predatory advantage over the competition.

Far too many law firms focus on the same channels (see table at the end)

What are the channels that are the most saturated or used by your competitors? Try to be different

Try to focus on fewer channels

You should never try to do all. The challenge is to find the one that will work the best for you and, once you find it, put 100% of your resources on it. It’s all about doing what works – not what you think should work, or what your peers approve.

A method to find what works

Start with a table like this, select all the ideas that come to your mind and list them in a table asking yourself questions like the probability that this idea works, how much will it cost, how much results you think it can bring and how much time you would need to run an experiment.

In the example of Miguel, he has 6 ideas in mind:

newsletter
videos
podcast
direct letters to potential clients
publication in specialized legal journals
LinkedIn posts with updates from the firm

Testing and experimenting are the only ways to find what works

Choose two out of the list and start to run an experiment. An experiment is an action that takes you little effort, but can get you far in learning and succeeding.

An example:

If you choose letters, count more or less 4 weeks: one week to create, one week to print, quite some costs for distribution and one week to evaluate how many people signed up digitally to your call.

If you choose newsletter, send an email to 10 people asking to subscribe to your newsletter. Wait and see how many of them finally subscribed.

These tests should be designed to roughly answer the following three questions:

How much will it cost to acquire new customers through this
channel?
How many customers are available/reachable through this channel?
Are the customers that you are getting to through this channel
are the kind of customers you want to have right now?

Once you have undertaken a targeted experimentation with a few of these channels, you need to choose one (1) laser focus on the core channel is more promising according to the data you collected through the experiments you made.

Law firm communication channels

social media posts from lawyers

social media campaign

a publication in a specialized law review

PR with journalist. being quoted by a journalist

specialized forums by sector (ex. energy)

Lawyers directories Chambers y Partners, FLR y Legal 500.

Personalized messages to their clients

Webinars

take your client for lunch + word of mouth

make bigger publications

a white paper (download it and give us your email)

show success stories with your blog

content marketing: writing for the blog (SEO)

newsletters

videos

podcast

The interconnected lives of ants, bees, humans and software. Placing diversity as enabler of a legal innovation strategy

Manuel Pueyo · Apr 22, 2021 ·

Nature is full of examples of successful collaborative processes, both intra- and inter-species.🐢🦈🐋🦜🌳

Collaborative structures in natural ecosystems often involve a diversity of species, as in the case of plant-animal win win collaborative networks. Members of these systems (the actors) play different roles, reflected in different services. For instance, in pollination networks, while the plants provide some food resource(nectar) to the animals🐝, the animals mediate pollination by transferring the pollen between plants.

There are more and more people looking at nature in order to find inspiration for improving practices and processes inside organizations.

What do legal organizations say and do when they talk about innovation? Could they also be inspired by nature? Forum, a publication from Barreaux De Bruxelles, the lawyers association in Brussels region, has published an article called Academie Digital Des Avocats in which they explain that in order to become digitally enhanced, a lawyer must innovate in order to push his client to see their problems from another angle. (“an avocat innovateur pour pousser son client a voir ses problematiques sous un autre angle”.) In other words he or she must be an “solution architect” bringing to the table expertise from different backgrounds.

I think we should all welcome and celebrate these words🎉🎉. This is totally new for a sector that was, until now, never really challenged or driven by innovation. Compared to other economic sectors (fashion, car industry, agriculture or banking), under strong pressure to innovate, law firms never had a reason to innovate. It was not in their DNA. That was clearly “a thing” for the others to do.

In the last 2 years I had the chance to speak to hundreds of lawyers👂. From my research “discoveries” I select 3 cases where I see innovation happening or at least intended. I also went to nature and we got inspired by what I saw there.

Big , Medium and Small they are all innovating (or at least they try)

The solution they try to bring in the innovative examples below might be technical, legal, psychological or human, business strategy or processes. When a team wants to offer new services in a new field, it’s called innovation. Some examples below…

Big global law firms: We want to be a business partner and legal is only part of it

I quote directly what I’ve heard from the communication department of a firm that has more than 1500 employees:

We should focus our efforts targeting the problems of the clients. If you want to provide advice that goes beyond legal, we have to focus on “the things” that matter to the general counsel or CEO. For example, if they have an issue with their staff, they have to deal with it asap, otherwise they will loose profit. We have to give them that kind of advice and make them feel we understand their business. They expect from us that we know not only about legal stuff, but also about their real problem.

Medium law firms

I met a company in Brussels that employs 12 lawyers giving advice on financial issues. They want to move from purely legal advice to offering value-based leadership, team culture transformation, and training on how a company should pay attention to ethical issues.

Small one-person law firm

I also had a nice walking conversation with Brussels based lawyer Severine Evrard. This year she is launching a very interesting training program or Mastermind as she calls it. Masterminds can help you have a better control of your professional life as a lawyer: how are emotions affecting us? how can we improve collaboration and better manage our time?

Lack of diversity in law firms is hindering innovation

Diversity is what keeps natural ecosystems alive. As we learn lessons from Covid-19, we see that a lack of biodiversity makes us more vulnerable to infections and diseases.

If you want to solve diverse problems you need to understand that only a diverse population is going to help you solve them.

I am going to be clear and very direct. I don’t see enough diversity in law firms. Law firms only hire lawyers. And often sometimes they only hire lawyers from the same university. This must change if the law firms want to innovate in the way described above. Otherwise they just end up “copying” one another.

Isabel Parker, chief legal innovation officer at Digital Legal Exchange in the UK says that cognitive diversity, working with multidisciplinary teams does bring better outcomes for clients, and thinks that the legal profession should open up to a more diverse talent pool.

In these times we live, diversity in the business environment is more than just bringing different business profiles. It also includes gender, race and ethnicity. It now includes employees with diverse religious and political beliefs, education, socioeconomic backgrounds, sexual orientation, cultures or disabilities.

How can diversity bring innovation in legal teams?

In a volatile and complex business scenario you need a multidisciplinary and diverse team to “build” a new service.

This relevant service you want to introduce has to be designed, ideated, prototyped, bugdeted, coded, measured, packaged and sold and this requires different skills.

A Boston Consulting Group study found that companies with more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenues due to innovation. This finding is significant for tech companies, start-ups and industries where innovation is the key to growth. It shows that diversity is not just a metric to strive for, it is actually an integral part of a successful revenue-generating business.

How can I include diversity in my firm?

Start by looking at what you have

Try to sense and feel what drives the members inside your team. Try to unlock hidden or under exploited potential. Maybe you have team members who like to draw diagrams✏️, learn data science📐 or bake cakes. All those capacities need to be acknowledge and exploited during the ideation and implementation phase of any innovation.

Recently I talked to a lawyer from a Brussels firm with 12 people. He took 1 year off legal duties to focus on content strategies, “legal design” and business development in general.

Those diverse individuals inside are often put in the spotlight or expected to help their colleagues get it right. Don’t leave them alone and give them air support and empowerment instead💪.

Start putting in place some “smart” metrics

Lord kelvin is often quoted on this, “if you cannot measure it , you cannot improve it”.

If the leaders inside law firms do not put in place measurable, specific and achievable goals on diversity inside the firm, it is just not going to happen.

Rethink your recruiting tactics

Your culture will be shaped by future recruits. Be proactive about the types of people you bring to your team. your job specifications should reflect your new values.
Start recruiting people with different profiles. and treat them as good as you do with your lawyers. I often see the non lawyers are considered inferior because they don’t invoice as much cost per hour.

Ecosystem Thinking

Understand that wicked problems are too complex to be solved by one organization alone and acknowledge the need for collaboration of a diverse ecosystems to achieve the change they are working towards. Try to approach problems with design thinking, systems design, and ecosystem mapping.

Combine diversity with affinity to your brand, vision and values

Too much diversity might also be difficult to manage. When you bring people who speak different “business languages” you need to combine this with some affinity in the form of a strong common goal and vision for your team.

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