Before drawing firm conclusions on the 2024 election and what to do next, take a clear-eyed view at what actually happened.

November 5 culminated several decades of economic, political, and social change. These changes gradually increased the electorate’s feelings of alienation and insecurity. When these feelings became sufficiently intense and widespread, more than 50% of voters rejected the governing elites in favor of a strongman. Therefore, what comes next is up to him.

Four charts illustrate the forces that produced this outcome. The underlying analysis comes from earlier Legal Evolution posts. So this is a cold take. Also, it’s not the usual longform. If you want the complete, unabridged analysis, click the hyperlinks to the original posts.Continue Reading A post-mortem in four charts (353)

An example of how contract playbooks designed by lawyer experts can be applied to commercial contracts using GenAI.

As the revolution in large language models (LLMs) makes its way into new startups and applications, would-be customers ask: How is my private data protected? Can commercial AI providers use my input data to train their models? The emergence of retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which can inject private data into prompts, has made this an urgent issue, particularly for companies building applications on top of LLMs since they often use those services on behalf of their customers. 

The big worry is that intellectual property, trade secrets, other sensitive information, or private information is unknowingly leaked to the public via an LLM’s future output for a different customer. Here is a sample nightmare scenario: Continue Reading Fine print face-off: which top large language models provide the best data protection terms? (352)

Source: Adobe Stock

The value of embracing roles outside our comfort zone

I recently became the Educational Co-Chair of ILTA‘s (International Legal Technology Association) EVOLVE Conference. I ended up in this role because my ambition for myself and my organization required me to wander outside my comfort zone. Yet, along the way, I’ve enjoyed building a community of fellow travelers—professionals in the legal industry who are climbing into the trenches to help build the first iteration of our cross-functional future. By helping each other, we all benefit.

In the spirit of community building, this post announces the (First Annual) ILTA EVOLVE. Relatedly, I will also share some of the details of my own cross-functional journey, which provide answers to three questions: Continue Reading Cross-functional is our future (351)

Source: “A Journey Toward Justice,” Stone Ridge Magazine (Winter 2021).

The unpaused version of Legal Evolution will be different. This post explains why.

Legal Evolution has been paused since January 2023. The most concise explanation for the pause is a rupture in my worldview, which I attempted to illustrate through my last post, “The Mindshare Matrix (349).” Without a solid foundation, writing seemed counterproductive.

During the past year, a friend commented that I was in a period of discernment. A short time later, a second friend made the same observation. Thus, I deferred to their wisdom and embraced the term. Nearly a year later, the purpose of this post is to share the solution to my own mindshare matrix, which includes some changes to Legal Evolution.

In preparing this re-entry post, I came across the above graphic, which is the discernment model of the Society of Sacred Heart. Its five component parts closely track my own journey. Thus, I am using it as a roadmap for this essay. Obviously, the Pause is complete. So, I’ll start with Reflect.Continue Reading Period of discernment (350)

Mindshare Matrix for legal professionals

The hardest puzzle I’ve ever tried to solve.

This is the last post for several months, as Legal Evolution is pausing publication until the fall of 2023. The reasons why don’t neatly fit into a box. In fact, per the graphic above, I needed several boxes to understand the problem I am trying to solve. I’m sharing my thoughts on this topic because I suspect some readers share some of my values and goals and hence will appreciate my candor.

The purpose of this post is to explain the mindshare matrix for legal professionals, using 20 years of observation plus my own work journey to illustrate the key points. After that, it’s a short walk to understand why the mindshare matrix is an immensely difficult problem to solve. Continue Reading Mindshare matrix for legal professionals (349)

The summer of our discontents

Two months ago, if you prompted Version 3 of the AI-art generator MidJourney to generate depictions of an “otter on a plane using wifi,” you were rewarded with the nonsense in the left panel of our lead graphic. A month later, Version 4 could take the same prompt and render, in seconds, multiple detailed drawings that are likely beyond 80% of the population’s imagination and certainly beyond 99.9% of the population’s acumen at illustration (above right panel).

Imagine what our new year will bring.

This matters. And we shall return to our wifi-enabled Mustelidae further down.

This lengthy essay has a lengthy preview essay authored by CSO Casey Flaherty. See Post 347. These two essays reflect nearly everything we are learning through our industry meetings. Although the act of writing is a crucial step in crystalizing our thinking for ourselves and our clients, we’ve done our best to make these essays enjoyable for readers.Continue Reading LexFusion’s Second Annual Legal Market Year in Review (348)

Winter is coming and many legal departments will be left in the cold.

Let’s get a difficult conceptual issue out of the way. This is a long post that some might construe as a criticism of large corporate legal departments. It’s also a preview of LexFusion’s Second Annual Legal Market Year in Review. See Post 280 (First Annual Review). So it’s fair to ask, “why is LexFusion’s Chief Strategy Officer spending so much time delivering a difficult set of truths to his company’s largest category of customers?”

My answer is two-fold. First, the LexFusion model does not work over the long run, or nearly as well as it could, unless we are helping solve significant operational and strategic problems. See Post 203 (discussing LexFusion business model). Second, as a lawyer counseling other lawyers, I owe them my honest assessments. And more so than any of my prior legal jobs, the LexFusion perch, with literally thousands of industry meetings per year, lends itself to root cause analysis. Root causes can be difficult to communicate and even more difficult to hear, but they’re also the ground floor of virtually all sustainable solutions.

With two years under my belt at LexFusion, I have more to say than last year. Hence, Bill has been kind enough to publish this preview essay. Taking advantage of the elongated Holiday weekend, tomorrow we’ll publish our co-authored Second Annual Legal Market in Review. See Post 348. Many thanks for your readership.Continue Reading Preview of the LexFusion Second Annual Legal Market in Review (347)

Henderson residence, Bloomington, IN, Christmas 2022.

Our publication schedule landed on Christmas this year. For this Sunday, anyway, there’s nothing happening in the legal industry that justifies our attention.  Instead, I’d like to wish everyone a wonderful holiday and a happy 2023.  Sincerely, Bill H.

Legal deserts are a surprisingly common problem. Yet, more surprising is the relatively modest cost of a solution.

In its annual Profile of the Legal Profession for 2020, the American Bar Association defined a legal desert as a county with fewer than one lawyer per 1000 people, which is 75% lower than the national average of four lawyers per 1000.  In chapter 1 of the Profile, ABA researchers painstakingly presented the data, state by state and county by county, noting that of the 3,100 counties or county-equivalents, nearly 1,300  (41%) fit the legal desert criteria.  See id (hereafter ABA Legal Desert Report).

To place the term “legal desert” into a broader context, approximately 15 years ago, food deserts became a popular term of art used to classify low-income communities without reasonable proximity to a local grocery store.  During the 2000s, as interest in obesity and diabetes rose across the nation, US Department of Agriculture, the White House, and public health advocates became focused on the social value and importance of eliminating food deserts.

In effect, the  ABA’s legal desert term extends the “desert” concept to justice and lawyer availability within a set geographic area (in this case counties). 
Continue Reading The minimum number of lawyers needed to eliminate legal deserts in the United States (345)

Good question.  I have a few thoughts.

In recent travels, I came across a group of women who appeared Amish in dress, talking and laughing with one another, and I experienced a surprising emotion—I was jealous.

For someone who runs towards the new, always testing the capability, seeing if it improves life for myself and others, and sharing it broadly if the answer is yes, the experience of jealousy when met with a conservative crew steeped in tradition (whether fair or not, some would say “frozen in time”) was puzzling.

After some self-investigation and reflection, I realized that I was envious of their sense of community. There is safety in numbers, there is also comfort in numbers. Comfort in community.
Continue Reading Q: NewLaw is hard. Why should I stay? (344)

Strong leaders voluntarily initiate their own performance feedback. The benefits of doing so are enormous.

[Editor’s note: Given the time of year and the topic of Patrick’s essay, this monthly leadership column is being published two weeks early. Enjoy! wdh]

There is an old adage in managing a client’s expectations that states, “whether we like it or not, we are going to be measured by our clients.”  If we take a very passive approach, the measuring stick against which we will be measured will be exclusively a creation of our client.  Alternatively, we can be proactive and help identify and shape the scorecard.

The same principle is equally true for law firm leaders (FL), especially in dealing with your elected board or executive committee (EC), as the partners and the EC become your expanded client constituency.  Working with your colleagues, especially early in your tenure, to formulate a proper feedback or evaluation process presents a terrific opportunity for you to manage everyone’s expectations.

This issue is especially timely in light of predicted declines in law firm profits.
Continue Reading Should firm leaders take the lead on their own performance review? (343)