On July 18, Exela sponsored the Kansas City Association of Legal Administrators (KCALA) monthly chapter meeting for July 2019. Around 15 law firms from the area attended the luncheon meeting at Lidia's in downtown Kansas City, MO. The meeting featured a lively presentation led by Exela's Vice President of Strategy & Business Development, Matt Crumrine, and Exela's Client Engagement Director, Michael Marinelli on the topic, Legal Services - Trends and State of the Market.

Here are the highlights of the presentation:

It’s increasingly a “client’s market” for law firms

The digital transformation landscape in the business world is driving changes in the way clients regard law firms, the services they provide, and the fees they charge. With increasing access to data, data analytics, and alternative legal service providers, law firm clients now possess greater insight into the services they need, who (or what) should provide those services, and the terms of service delivery.

The economic environment for law firms is currently “slow growth.”

While Matt and Mike pointed out the overall demand for legal services remains strong, eight years of slow growth has put the legal industry in a hyper-competitive state. Fortunately, the possibilities for utilizing technology to boost law firm efficiency and productivity are multiplying rapidly, and law firm clients are ready to see those changes take effect. One industry periodical recently reported that one-third businesses would prefer their law firms to offer digital services, and 68% of lawyers surveyed by the American Bar Association have fielded at least one request to utilize new technologies, like e-discovery, in the last year. However, only half of all law firms have yet to respond by making use of the available technology.

Find out: is your law firm falling behind?

Even as some firms adopt digital transformation initiatives that contribute to more efficient lawyering, billing utilization rates continue to drop, with the average lawyer now working 144 less billable hours, per year, versus a decade ago.

Dynamic firms versus static firms

Recent data has revealed that law firms adopting a more proactive, or "dynamic" model of addressing client needs via alternative staffing strategies, flexible pricing models, evolving work processes, and better use of technology, are outperforming their more static counterparts. Interestingly, this suggests the gap between high-performing and lower-performing firms is not being driven through differences in practice area or areas of expertise, but with their approach to addressing traditional challenges through innovation.

Profile of a “dynamic” firm:

• Leveraging technology and automation to free lawyers’ time for higher-value work
• Offering clients flexible pricing and alternative fee arrangements upfront
• Embracing continuous learning, training, and knowledge sharing
• Top-down cultural transformation, the importance of which should not be discounted

As Mike points out, “Culture eats policy and procedure for breakfast.” In other words, a law firm whose leadership hasn’t embraced the tech-culture imperative can purchase all the systems and services available but shouldn’t expect the vast majority of its workforce to utilize them.

What’s lies ahead

We don't have a crystal ball and can't predict the future. However, Matt and Mike do believe that a small number of law firms will bet and win big on digital transformation, and a new generation of tech-native lawyers will continue to move their respective law firms toward the more dynamic approach. We've seen firsthand it is possible to teach an "old law firm new tech." We’ve got the case studies right here.

When it comes to delivering desired outcomes to end-users in the context of digital transformation, the first rule of thumb is understanding who your end-users are. Of course, that’s no simple task, as we explain here. Luckily, one of Exela’s strengths is that we recruit and cultivate leaders who possess exceptional analytical prowess. One such leader is Tatiana Koleva, Exela’s Senior Vice President of Service Delivery. Tatiana is responsible for the services Exela delivers on-site for customers in the financial services- and legal-industries. In other words, Tatiana is on-site with our financial services and legal industry customers, ensuring end-user satisfaction at every level, even as the end-user landscape is in a constant state of evolution.

“I interact with people all day long and it is what I love most,” Tatiana tells us. In addition, she feels “privileged” to be leading her teams of “dedicated, customer-focused professionals who strive to deliver excellence in service every day.”

How Tatiana came to be doing what she’s doing

Tatiana attributes her success and her current position to “good fortune,” but it’s clear she’s worked hard for everything she’s achieved. “Six months after arriving in the U.S. from my home country of Bulgaria, I got an entry level job with the outsourcing division of Pitney Bowes and started learning about business and leadership and taking every opportunity to learn and grow.”

Tatiana’s favorite Exela offering

“I am really excited about Smart Office,” Tatiana tells us. “So many of our customers are focused on improving the experience of the millennials they're hiring, while also keeping real estate costs down. Our technology solves both. Our solutions provide visibility as to how services are used. As such, they can be provided where needed to enhance the user experience, while reducing the expense of providing them. It is a win-win.”

What Tatiana’s working on—right this very minute

“We are working on expanding services globally for many customers. It presents new challenges to solve for, which excites me, as well as the team.”

Tatiana on “innovation”

If you ask a handful of people how they define “innovation,” you’ll get a handful of different answers. What we’ve noticed is that the way one defines “innovation” has a lot to do with that person’s particular relationship to innovation. For example, this one comes from a tech-marketing perspective. For Tatiana, “innovation is a cultural trait, it is how we think about what we do, how we listen and respond to client needs, how we define the future of how our customers operate and how we deliver services. Sometimes it is progressive and sometimes it is disruptive. It’s change as a way of life.”

We asked Tatiana to give us her #FiveWordsAboutYou.

Here’s what she came up with:

• #determined
• #fearless
• #extrovert
• #disciplined
• #open-minded

What you probably don’t know about Tatiana

• Would you have guessed that Tatiana wrote poetry when she was younger?
• She also loves dancing and grew up dancing with her family.
• While growing up in a communist country, she really had little exposure to “business” as we know it in a capitalist society. So, her idea of success back then was to be a diplomat, and that was her dream job as a child.
• Favorite author since childhood: Oscar Wilde
• Favorite film: The Intouchables (a French buddy comedy-drama film from 2011 that her daughter, who was studying French, wanted her to watch). “It left quite an impression on me.”

Here’s more about the industry-specific solutions we’re delivering to our financial services industry customers, and to our legal industry customers.

Note:

Not all of Exela’s business process optimization solutions are industry-specific, however, and many of our clients, including our financial services and legal industry customers are also benefitting from our broad variety of solutions designed to optimize the business processes of enterprises in virtually any industry.

These include the entire array of Smart Office suite of solutions referenced by Tatiana above. You can learn all about how a major institution deployed one such solution, Intelligent Lockers, to great advantage.