The flurry of new legal industry buzzwords—“new law,” “legal technology,” “legal ops,” and so on—may be seen as fresh icing on a stale cake. They’re not, however, a substitute for real change that impacts the economics and customer experience of the law.
In an era of accelerated change and significant global challenges that cannot be mastered by a single person, enterprise, stakeholder group or nation, the legal function will need to collaborate with other business functions, stakeholders and industries. This will require a multidisciplinary team that is holistically diverse—cognitively, demographically, culturally and experientially—but also collaborative, tech-proficient, empathetic and customer-centric.
A key requirement for this future legal workforce is data agility. This is mastery of data’s prime value elements: capture, unification, applied human and artificial intelligence, visualization, real-time refresh, and decision driving. Legal teams with this capability will be able to identify, mitigate, extinguish or eschew risk, accelerate resolution of disputes and opportunities, free-up management to focus on core objectives, and generate better, more informed risk assessment and legal decisions.
In addition to data agility, the future legal workplace will have an integrated platform-based delivery structure from which agile, fluid and on-demand resources with verifiable, material expertise and experience can be sourced. Profit will not be derived from adherence to a legacy economic model that relies on input but rather a purpose-driven, customer-centric, data-backed, technology-enabled model fueled by output and net promoter score.
Lastly, new law will be more collaborative, scalable and solutions-based. This will enable the legal function to produce faster, practical and cost-effective solutions for what were historically bespoke legal matters. It will also provide a repository of data and collective experience that can be leveraged to improve the quality of legal advice and services, lower the cost of delivery, and address the growing societal need for accessible, affordable and efficient access to justice.
The Department of Citywide Administrative Services in consultation with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) is preparing a notice for agency employees and job applicants regarding the availability of federal and state student loan forgiveness programs. DCWP will make the notice available to all City agencies and employers in New York City for distribution to their employees and job applicants.
NYC Council Bills
The following bills were recently introduced or passed by the City of New York. To see more legislation, visit Laws of the City or NYC Rules.
NYPD
This bill would require all firearm owners to report the serial number and date of manufacture of all weapons, ammunition or components in the course of conducting a background check. The information gathered from this reporting will help to prevent criminals from illegally purchasing and possessing firearms, and will also facilitate the investigation of crimes committed by gun owners.