What is Law New?
The rapid pace of business and society change makes it impossible to render a portrait of “law new.” However, some of the defining features are taking shape.
Law new will be fluid and collaborative. It will leverage agile, customer-centric and technology-backed processes, and it will have a global delivery structure that enables the legal function to be integrated with its customers’ internal business operations. This will allow the industry to avoid the significant lost opportunity costs of protracted disputes, and it will enable legal and cross-functional enterprise colleagues to be proactive in identifying, eradicating, mitigating or extinguishing risk and capturing business opportunities.
It will also align legal services with other business priorities and value drivers, and it will be accessible, affordable, on-demand, scalable, data-driven, and delivered by a broad spectrum of service providers. As such, it will more closely resemble its corporate customers and society at large. Its workforce will be diverse – cognitively, demographically and culturally, and it will be creative, tech-proficient, empathetic, and team-oriented.
This bill would require City agencies that experience a breach of personal information involving private identifying information of persons to promptly notify the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), and each affected person, about the breach. It would also amend NYC’s data breach laws to make them more consistent with State law.
This law would require the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, in consultation with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, to prepare a notice for employees and job applicants regarding student loan forgiveness programs. It would also repeal subchapter 22 of chapter 5 of title 20 of the administrative code of the city of New York relating to licensing third-party food delivery services.
In the past, most of the focus on law new has been on finding ways to cut costs. Today, the main objective is to unleash firms’ potential to serve their clients’ needs in innovative ways.
The best way to think about this is to consider how a law firm would operate if it were owned by the client – what would its mission be? What kind of impact would it want to have in the market and society at large?
This is a different paradigm than the current law firm model where most firms focus on legal ops, ALSP’s and legal innovation. These efforts are good delivery hygiene but they do not produce the kind of transformation required to drive customer impact and enhance the client experience. The kind of transformation required is a shift in mindset and requires a focus on strategy, not just implementing technology. Fit-for-purpose technology investments and design should be a component of a larger strategic plan that is reverse-engineered from the end-user perspective. This is what law new truly means. If you’d like to learn more about law new, contact us. We’re happy to help.