Creating Law 2.0—Lawyers of Tomorrow & Legal Knowledge Engineers of Today

Posted on May 16, 2013 by

In the 143 years since Christopher Columbus Langdell pioneered the case method at Harvard Law School, legal education and the legal profession have remained virtually unchanged. Economic troubles have come and gone. Wars have been fought and won. And yet, law schools and the profession have carried on, status quo ante.

But now, not. Beginning in the recession of 2007, thousands of lawyers have lost their jobs. And there will be a traditional lawyer’s job for only about half of the 44,000 students who will graduate this year. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the market will demand only 22,000 net lawyer jobs per year over the next decade.

On the law firm front, “we’re not going to see the death of Biglaw, as some have prophesied, but we’re not getting a return to 2007 either. Instead, we’re seeing the accentuation of macro-level forces that began before the crash, and these forces are reshaping the global market for legal services. Law firms must adapt to the new reality.” (Professor David Wilkins, Director of the Program on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, Above The Law, 5/10/13)

So what is to be done? Some say legal education needs a complete transformation—two years rather than three, a clinical or apprentice third year, lower tuition, fewer law schools. Perhaps—we leave that debate, and the wrenching institutional changes it may bring, to the law schools and the ABA—but in the meantime the lawyers of tomorrow need to be able to do more than read books (even e-books) and do legal research online (even with the newest and best search and analysis tools).

To remain relevant, lawyers must combine their legal expertise with technological know-how. It won’t come without changes in legal training, though. The Socratic method is still a marvel, but it doesn’t touch the digital domain.  Proof?  Since 2005, the “other legal services” employment segment has experienced double-digit growth year over year while traditional legal employment has shrunk.

Not only are today’s lawyers faced with changing technology, but also with the new environment these changes create. Professor Wilkins catalogs some of the new pressures law firms are encountering:  value-based fees (steady erosion of the billable hour), legal process outsourcing, alternative legal providers offering comprehensive managed services. “To succeed, law firms will need to pay greater attention to the needs of their clients. There’s currently a gap between law firm and in-house perceptions of what constitutes good client service.” (Above the Law, 5/10/13)

Oliver Goodenough, who established the Center for Legal Innovation at Vermont Law School says, “The law is shaped by the technology that supports it. One hundred years ago, we developed the case method because of a technological innovation of the time—the spread of cheap, mechanized printing—that subsequently influenced the way we argue about law in court, how we approach scholarship, and the very conceptual foundation of the American justice system. I believe there is significant economic opportunity and creativity to be unleashed when rules and laws exist in ways that reflect actually how we work today.”

Wilkins and Goodenough are not alone. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University Law School, and Co-Director of ReInvent Law, identifies a skills mismatch between what today’s market demands and what young lawyers are trained to do. In his keynote at the Stanford CodeX FutureLaw Conference, Katz called for an end to the “age of mimicry.”

“Law schools,” says Katz, “should stop aspiring to be the next Harvard or Yale and approach the legal education process from an entirely different angle. Substantive legal expertise is not enough for the lawyers of the future. These nimble creatures must be trained to perform the traditional legal tasks and responsibilities, but also to incorporate information technology, problem solving and project management into their practice.”

Katz calls for a new model, the “MIT School of Law.” Math will be required. It will include classes like legal analytics, electronic discovery, virtual law practice, quantitative methods for lawyers, computer programming for lawyers and artificial intelligence and law. It will be hard.

Wilkins also suggests changing the current legal education model. “If law schools want to remain relevant and viable, they will have to shift towards preparing their students for practical workplace success.” (Above the Law, 5/10/13)

There are other technology pioneers among law schools—Brigham Young, Chicago-Kent, Columbia, Georgetown, Harvard, Indiana, McGeorge, Miami, New York, Suffolk—and a comprehensive list is being gathered by the ABA eLawyering Task Force.

So what’s the holdup?  If the future for traditional legal practitioners is so bleak, why aren’t more schools and firms jumping to embrace new technology and new ideas? Katz says it’s a “delivery of services” challenge. Yes, it is certainly a challenge, but resistance is futile. The sooner law schools embrace the already arrived future, the sooner their graduates will find jobs. The sooner law firms hustle themselves into the present, the sooner their clients will be happy.

Carolyn Elefant summed it up after the 2013 Iron Tech Lawyer Competition at Georgetown University Law Center:

“Developing these types of expert systems is also a great learning experience – kind of a Socratic method on steroids, only self-taught. In order to create these programs, students have to consider all of these possibilities themselves. There’s no way to learn a law or regulation better than to climb inside it and spend four straight months with it – and that’s what this project forced students to do. It’s ironic that programming a machine teaches students to think like lawyers—but it does. And it’s that ability to consider every aspect of a case, break it down and quickly make decisions that builds the kind of judgment that sets lawyers apart from form fillers and will save us from extinction.” (MyShingle.com 4/18/13)

Neota Logic collaborated with Professor Tanina Rostain and Assistant Professor Roger Skalbeck at Georgetown on their Technology, Innovation & Law Practice course, and worked with the student teams building expert systems using our Neota Logic Server.

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Georgetown Iron Tech Lawyer Competition 2013: Tweets and Resources

Posted on April 18, 2013 by

Reblogged from Legal Informatics Blog:

This post contains links to tweets and other resources from the 2013 Georgetown Iron Tech Lawyer Competition: Access to Justice Edition, held 17 April 2013 at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC, USA.

Click here for the event's Webpage.

The event was organized by Professor Tanina Rostain and Adjunct Professor Roger V. Skalbeck, both of Georgetown University Law Center, as part of their practicum entitled…

Read more… 219 more words

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Dissing Disruption

Posted on April 16, 2013 by

Somewhere along the road from the start of ReInventLaw Silicon Valley on March 8 to the end of the  ABA Tech Show on April 6, part of the law futures blogotweetosphere has come down with disruption fatigue. Examples here and here.

A measure of fatigue, or at least skepticism, is understandable, to be sure. Pep rallies at which we all shout and wave flags to pump ourselves up for the next game are not real work or progress in themselves,  though they are fun and good for the spirit, especially in this slow-moving legal profession. (Been to a ReInventSoftware conference lately? Nope—there’s plenty of action without a rally.)

Nonetheless, here at Neota Logic we’re quite cheerful about disruptive innovation, so we’ll join in to comment on a few points made in the recent discussions. Those we agree with are of course right and true. Those we disagree with are … otherwise.

Law + Tech + Design + Delivery. These are the ReInvent Law Laboratory’s “four pillars of innovation for the legal services industry.” Dan Katz and Renee Knake have that architecture right, and are fomenting terrific—and, yes, potentially disruptive—experiments at MSU.

As are Tanina Rostain at Georgetown, Ron Staudt at Chicago-Kent, Andrew Perlman and Marc Lauritsen at Suffolk, Oliver Goodenough at Vermont, Phil Malone at Harvard, Brian Donnelly and Conrad Johnson at Columbia, the CodeX Crew at Stanford, Steph Kimbro at Dayton and Larry Farmer at BYU (and, we hope, others we haven’t heard about yet).

Neota Logic’s collaboration with Georgetown University Law Center gives us great confidence in an emerging generation of lawyers who will take up the challenge to build a new model of legal services—not only in the not-for-profit sector but also in the consumer,  government and corporate sectors.

Although Clayton Christensen counsels that “disruption is a process and not an event … in some industries it might take decades for the forces to work their way through” (The Innovator’s Solution, Ch. 2, fn. 15.), we agree with Richard Susskind that for this profession “the time has now come.” LTN, April 1, 2013.

Are LegalZoom and RocketLawyer disruptive? Opinions differ. We come down on the side of Yes.

First, those companies are serving people who would otherwise have gone to their friendly neighborhood lawyer for a will or contract—thus displacing, or at least changing the market structure of, solos and small-firm lawyers who have traditionally done much of the kind of work that LZ and RL now do, via both their automated forms and their lawyer-matching businesses.

Second, LZ and RL are serving people who otherwise wouldn’t have had any legal guidance at all.

That sure sounds to us like what Christensen had mind: “A disruptive innovation transforms a product that historically was so expensive and complicated that only a few people with a lot of money and a lot of skill had access to it. A disruptive innovation makes it so much more affordable and accessible that a much larger population can have access to it.” Clayton Christensen, March 30, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDrMAzCHFUU.

In the same way, Georgetown University Law Center students and other students in the Legal Services Corporation’s Apps4Justice Project are creating applications with not-for-profit legal services providers that meet an otherwise unmet demand for affordable, practical, accessible legal guidance. Pro Bono Net’s Law Help Interactive delivered more than 500,000 documents last year.

Serving people who otherwise wouldn’t have had any legal guidance at all is a problem in the corporate world as well. Every day in every big company hundreds of business decisions that have potentially significant legal implications are being made without legal guidance. Getting advice is expensive, time-consuming and often organizationally (or even geographically) difficult. For these relatively routine, relatively straightforward legal questions, general counsel are too busy and outside counsel too expensive.

Is this disruptive innovation? One might say No, because in neither the not-for-profit nor corporate sector is there an immediate disruptee. But have a look at this diagram from The Innovator’s Solution, Ch. 2—

two kinds of disruption copy

Note down there in the lower-left corner the New-Market Disruption, competing against “non-consumption.” And remember the other key lesson of disruptive innovation—that disruptors start low and then move up the curve, eating the incumbents’ margins and eventually their businesses.

One can, and many law firms surely do, view Axiom through that lens as it moves into “end-to-end management and delivery of complex legal processes.”

When Jordan Furlong described Neota Logic as disruptive technology, one commentator complained that our technology cannot “read between the lines … [or] hold hands and wipe away tears.” You will surely see a press release when we can.

But that’s a straw person. A useful fraction of what clients need, and what lawyers actually do, can be done by software—we know that because we do it. And when software can’t (or shouldn’t) give an answer, it will send the client along to a lawyer. It is every lawyer’s professional responsibility to know what he doesn’t know, and guide the client to competent counsel when he’s not it. Professionally responsible software does the same thing.

On the hard question that Jordan poses—“Can law firms employ disruptive innovation?”—Clayton Christensen’s research counsels pessimism but not despair.

Hewlett-Packard jumped the disruption curve from laser to inkjet printers by creating “a completely autonomous organizational unit” in a different state and then “let the two businesses complete against each other.” The Innovator’s Dilemma, Ch. 5 at Fig. 5.4. Before counseling a managing partner to adopt HP’s strategy, one should, in fairness, note that Christensen titled HP’s story “Survival By Suicide.” Managing partners lives are hard enough.

Intel responded to the threat of low-end chip manufacturers by learning how to beat the disruptive competitors at their own game—a rough ride, but in the end successful. Clayton Christensen, March 30, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDrMAzCHFUU.

The initiatives by Seyfarth and Littler that Jordan Furlong describes follow this line.

Millions of TurboTax users certainly hope the program is “an improvement from an inexperienced” tax lawyer. In fact, I will wager it is an improvement over most experienced tax lawyers—in its proper domain, which is most tax problems of most people most of the time, not hard cases for people with complex business affairs.

Even at higher levels of tax challenge, most accountants (including the Big 4) use software to solve most problems—from the Intuit Pro Series on up to Vertex and Big 4 proprietary programs. These programs are better than any one—or two or five—tax lawyers, because they encode the collective expertise of dozens of specialists, and because they neither forget what they have learned nor wilt from fatigue as April 15 approaches.

Even the IRS uses expert systems—not only to advise taxpayers but also to coach the IRS employees who answer taxpayers’ questions on the phone. Have a look at http://www.irs.gov/uac/Interactive-Tax-Assistant-(ITA)-1.

As Jon Busby wrote, the players who matter most are the clients. But we see more client activity in this arena than evidently he does. Is that a US/UK difference? Initiatives like the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Value Challenge and Legal Services Management Workshop, and the changes that many general counsel have made to outside counsel management and fee structures, have created a field on which innovation is possible, indeed essential.

J.B. Ruhl’s blog may be named Law2050, but we don’t need to wait 37 years to see “embedding legal compliance”, or in Richard Susskind’s phrase “embedded legal knowledge.” We don’t expect our cars to know the traffic laws any time soon, nor would we want them to, but software systems in government and business already have lots of law written into their code.

With conventional software tools—programming languages, databases and the like—that’s a very hard slog, the resulting rules are invisible or opaque to those affected, and keeping up with changes is expensive. Purpose-built tools for law and compliance make the task feasible.

And, to close on a commercial note, it happens that our technology, the Neota Logic Server, does exactly that.

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The Crisis of Complexity

Posted on April 10, 2013 by

A recent essay in the Wall Street Journal describes “a crisis of complexity” in modern life:

“In a typical day, we encounter dozens—if not dozens upon dozens—of moments when we are delayed, frustrated or confused by complexity. Our lives are filled with gadgets we can’t use (automatic sprinklers, GPS devices, fancy blenders), instructions we can’t follow (labels on medicine bottles, directions for assembling toys or furniture) and forms we can’t decipher (tax returns, gym membership contracts, wireless phone bills).”

The essay suggests that we follow Thoreau’s prescription to “simplify, simplify.”  ”When Simplicity is the Solution“ But few details are provided on how to achieve simplicity in modern life, other than to say that it is more “art” than science, and that organizations need to do a better of job of “empathizing” with their customers and clients.

We agree — of course — that it would be good to simplify the design and implementation of modern gadgets, instructions, forms, rules, and regulations.   Unfortunately, achieving such simplicity is notoriously hard to do.  It seems unrealistic to expect principles of good design suddenly to become the norm in industry and government.  So, instead, people will likely continue to be inundated with poorly designed new gadgets, laws, forms, and instructions, leading to an increase in complexity and frustration.

But all is not lost.   What if you had an omniscient and objective human expert beside you at all times, to help you cut through the inevitable complexity of modern life?  This trusted expert would provide the instant guidance required to use that new gadget, or fill out that form, or understand the label on that medicine bottle, or choose your next wireless plan. The good news is that — in all of these areas — there are human experts who could indeed provide you with guidance.  The bad news is that these human experts — especially the best ones — are scarce, busy, and expensive.

This is where Internet-based expert system software can help.  Such software makes it possible to provide online, situation-specific, just-in-time guidance to customers and clients. By automating the knowledge of top human experts, expert system technology makes it possible to provide millions of people with instant access to such advice in a cost-efficient way.

This is already happening in some areas mentioned in the WSJ essay.   Preparation of run-of-the-mill tax returns, for example, has been simplified by programs and services such as TurboTax and H&R Block Online that embody the expertise of human tax experts. These online expert systems enable millions of people each year to prepare and file tax returns themselves, without the need to study and understand tax laws and IRS regulations, and without the need to hire prohibitively expensive lawyers or accountants. The problem is that TurboTax and similar systems themselves had to be built by programmers, using expensive and time-consuming methods and tools that cannot easily be replicated across other areas.   The approach that was used to build TurboTax will not scale across the many other areas of modern life where expert systems will be needed to provide guidance.

This is where Neota Logic comes in.  Neota Logic’s new software platform now makes it possible to build, deploy, and maintain complex expert systems more quickly and cost-efficiently.  Returning to the examples in the WSJ essay, imagine an online Neota Logic system that offers tailored expert advice to consumers struggling to choose the most appropriate wireless phone and service contract.  Or imagine an online Neota Logic system that provides tailored guidance to a homeowner trying to configure a fancy automated sprinkler system to do exactly what the homeowner wants. Or imagine an online Neota Logic system that provides situation-specific guidance to a patient about the possible side-effects of a prescribed drug, given his or her medical history and current condition. Many other examples could be provided.  See, e.g., Chapter Five, “Disruptive Legal Technologies”, in Richard Susskind’s book, Tomorrow’s Lawyers (Oxford University Press 2013).

Neota Logic provides a realistic way to deal with the inherent complexity of modern life.  It may not be possible to make modern gadgets, laws, and instructions simple.  But it is possible — with Neota Logic — to build online advisory systems that make life simpler and less frustrating for people who need to navigate through an increasingly complex world.

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Scale, Simplicity, and Truth: NLS 6.0

Posted on April 2, 2013 by

We are very pleased to release today Neota Logic Server 6.0, now the most modern business rules and decision management software on the market. In NLS 6.0 we have focused on three themes – Scale, Simplicity and Truth.

Scale

The core reasoning engine of Neota Logic Server (NLS) has been rewritten from the ground up in Scala, a powerful, modern language whose virtues we wrote about recently. NLS can now deliver its unique capabilities for very complex rulesets in very high-volume contexts such as auditing financial transactions and advising e-commerce customers. Clustered virtual servers can be scaled to any necessary level.

For developers, the NLS integrated development environment (called Author, to emphasize that one need not be a programmer to create powerful applications) now runs on Mac as well as Windows and is entirely cloud-based. All development artifacts – applications, documentation, test scenarios, versions and so on – are centrally managed by NLS in the cloud and are easily accessible to authors from the NLS Workbench. Only a single native launcher application is installed locally, to assure that the latest software versions are in place; the launcher is downloadable on demand.

NLS can now easily be used anywhere by anyone.

Simplicity

Design of the Neota Logic Server is driven by two fundamental goals:

  • The most important legal, compliance and business problems require solutions that are flexible, subtle, precise, integrated, and often complex. No single form of rule expression and no single method of reasoning is sufficient, or even adequate for such problems. Attempting to solve them with traditional programming and business rules tools is impractical and inflexible. We must therefore provide multiple forms of expression and multiple forms of reasoning, as well as a framework for rapidly incorporating new expressions and new reasoning engines – both general purpose and domain-specific.
  • It is both necessary and possible to enable people who are not programmers – law students, lawyers, business analysts, and many others – to create powerful applications.

Of course these two goals are always in tension – simplicity to allow the widest possible community of creators, power to build the most useful applications. We confront the tension in every design decision, and continue to examine and re-examine every aspect of NLS from this viewpoint. Is the feature useful, logical, learnable, teachable, complete, necessary? Is the user experience as simple as possible, for both novice and expert authors?

Version 6 introduces significant improvements to the Author user experience, which we believe will make creating applications significantly easier and faster. We have also improved the capabilities of Workbench, the “management console” for authors and site administrators.

Truth

Complex applications are indeed complex. It is therefore a challenge for subject matter experts – the sources of knowledge, policy and practice that are embedded in applications – to verify that the applications in fact do what they are intended to do, that the rules and outcomes are correct. And, keeping in mind the critical goal of simplicity, how do we make the process of validation and verification – of proof, if you will – as easy as possible for authors and for subject matter experts?

Version 6 introduces two powerful new tools for verification, and improves two existing tools. All of these tools are built into the Author integrated development environment and can be run with a few clicks.

  • AutoDocs – A plain-English report, in a Word document, of all elements of an application that subject matter experts can review. AutoDocs includes all facts, questions, help text, logic and outputs. Version 6 gives authors new flexibility to select elements for inclusion in AutoDocs, and a convenient method for subject matter experts to access AutoDocs for their review.
  • Static Analysis – A visual tool for analysis of key aspects of application logic such as paths to and from a conclusion, possible loops, inconsistencies and missing elements. Version 6 adds new analysis modes.
  • Live Analysis – A dynamic debugging tool with which authors can run live sessions of an application, tracing logic at each step, with standard software debugging capabilities. New in Version 6.
  • Solver – A comprehensive tool for validation testing and regression testing. Allows authors to define input sets for applications, which may be run exhaustively or by randomized Monte Carlo sampling, with results saved to the database and available in Excel format for analysis. New in Version 6.

NLS 6.0 provides us with a strong foundation from which we can continue to transform the delivery of professional advice.  Tailored, situation-specific advice applications can be developed and deployed faster, better and of course cheaper on NLS 6.0.

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Less Than One Month Until Iron Tech Lawyer Competition at Georgetown Law Center

Posted on March 21, 2013 by

April 17th is now set as the day for the next Iron Tech Lawyer contest at Georgetown Law Center. Tanina Rostain (@TaninaRostain) and Roger Skalbeck (@weblawlib) are building on their great success with their practicum course in application development last year.

This semester they are going a big step further by partnering with legal service providers and public interest organizations that have identified particular useful applications for the students to build in collaboration with mentors from each sponsoring organization.

The following organizations are all working on applications that will assist their clients:

Tanina’s courses give students experiential learning by making applications designed to be deployed to an active user community. Tanina and Roger can be regarded as the pioneers of The Maker Movement in law. Her students are learning the skills to make applications to deliver straightforward advice and/or to triage and more efficiently route tougher problems to those legal aid resources best able to deal with the issues identified during a logic driven online interview. Georgetown is creating a road map for the practice of law in the 21st century.

This year’s judges are Peter Edelman (@peterbedelman), an expert on poverty law, and Robin West, who writes in jurisprudence, family law, feminist theory, and many other areas.   Two are ‘outside’ judges who are tech law experts:  Georgetown Law graduate and CEO of Ask.com, Doug Leeds and Scott D. Rechtschaffen, Littler Mendelson’s Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO).

The student teams are using Neota Logic’s expert system to design the applications they will present. Neota Logic has provided them with software and all our ‘expertise on-ramping’ materials and they are busily working away at getting everything ready to pitch to the judges on the 17th.

Next semester Tanina and her colleague Victoria Nourse, an expert on administrative law,  will be conducting a “Regulatory Agencies and Compliance” practicum to provide students with in-depth exposure to the two sides of regulatory practice. The students will work with Georgetown’s extensive network of government attorneys to identify citizens’ advice applications for students to build and showcase to agencies.

Click here for a video from last year’s inaugural Iron Tech Lawyer Competition.

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Faster, Better, Cheaper for Law Departments – What Really Works?

Posted on March 7, 2013 by

Lawyers are trained to reason by analogy. Data doesn’t much matter. So the profession mostly makes decisions by guess and by golly. Fortunately, the metrics movement among corporate law departments (Rees Morrison’s General Counsel Metrics (@reesmorrison) and CEB General Counsel Roundtable leading the way) is bringing data into the discussion. We begin to have evidence to test the hunches.

In its latest report, CEB draws upon analysis of 180 legal department budgets to identify nine things that really work, nine specific actions that a department can take to reduce costs. Surprises? No.

Do the obvious: in-house is cheaper (assuming level workloads); disaggregate; plan & budget; and so on.

The full list is here. Pat Lamb’s take on it is here (@ValoremLamb). And Catherine Moynihan, @CathJMoyn, of the Association of Corporate Counsel, @ACCinhouse, says CEB’s findings are consistent with what ACC sees among its Value Champions.

At Neota Logic, which is a technology company and in the business of doing professional advice differently (or different, as Apple used to say), we’re most interested in one tactic that CEB identified, and one that it didn’t.

Invest in Legal Operations Capabilities – CEB says that 80 percent of large legal departments now have a professional (maybe a lawyer, maybe an MBA) whose full-time job is to think about (and manage toward delivering) improvements in department services. Faster, better, and these days especially, cheaper.  Law firms started down this road many years ago, creating senior positions devoted to practice technology, knowledge management, business development and, more recently, project management, service delivery and pricing.

Our experience, as lawyers practicing in firms serving corporate clients and as a technology company providing tools to those same clients, has been that Legal Operations Officers, when they have general counsel support, make a dramatic difference in a department’s ability to think and act innovatively and effectively. Lawyers have day jobs – managing litigation, counseling business people, putting out fires. However much they want to improve the ways things are done, they don’t often have the bandwidth. That’s what Legal Operations can do – leverage lawyers to enable innovation. So we applaud the trend toward appointment of Legal Operations Officers that CEB identified.

Demand Management – CEB did not talk about demand management, but we think it is a vital tactic for reduced costs and improved outcomes.

We are indebted to Susan Hackett (@HackettInHouse, @LawExecs) for introducing us to the concept of demand management, a technique for reducing external counsel costs in litigation by active case management.  (The Association of Corporate Counsel, @ACCinhouse, has an excellent article on demand management at Royal Bank of Canada.)

We think demand management can be a far broader and more useful concept for law departments. Analyze the sources (the root causes, if you will) of legal work that flows into the department, and then follow the analysis upstream into the business – to solve business problems before they generate legal problems; and to embed legal guidance in business processes precisely where and when it’s needed, without adding demand to the legal department’s agenda.

Demand management, as reconceived here, is one of the things that Neota Logic does. Applications built with our technology:

a)       Answer routine legal questions for business people who would otherwise not get legal advice at all (because doing so via traditional methods is too costly, too distant, too time-consuming), thereby reducing mistakes and consequently the demand for mistake-fixing legal services; and

b)      When (a) isn’t enough, intelligently route the not-so-routine questions to lawyers after collecting all the basic information that usually wastes the first two hours of the lawyer’s time.

Working to the same goal, Lisa Damon’s Seyfarth Lean team (@ldamon) helps legal departments to do rigorous upstream analysis and then identify business and process improvements that can prevent legal problems before they occur.

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