Efficiency v. Effectiveness v. Innovation: Why Draw Lines?

There's a quiet debate among legal pundits that's often played out on social media sites such as Twitter, one that probably not too many people pay attention to. It's almost an ancillary argument to the "traditional" way of billing for legal services, but it a debate that I believe cuts to the heart of value and innovation in our profession. On the one side is the "effectiveness" argument, and one of the most outspoken voices on the topic is Ron Baker of California-based VeraSage Institute. Mr. Baker is a proponent of the death of the billable hour, and frames many of his opinions regarding legal value with the "effectiveness trumps efficiency" argument. If you're on Twitter, I would encourage you to follow Mr. Baker. Another proponent of the demise of the billable hour is Pat Lamb of Chicago-based Valorem Law Group – you might recognize Pat from recent 'New Normal' posts on the subject on the ABA Journal website. In a blog post over the weekend, Pat addressed the notion that effectiveness comes at the sacrifice of efficiency, and that the pursuit of efficiency stifles innovation. Pat says it all very well, but I'd like to tack on a couple of thoughts. When undertaken properly, the search for efficiency can undoubtedly lead to innovation. We see it firsthand when we look at the processes of our clients; how they manage their legal work, who touches the documents, if there are better ways to allocate resources, where money can be saved and work can be handled better, as well as many other factors. We put a new plan into action and, as the process evolves, we look at how our attorneys are working, if the quality (or "effectiveness") is meeting or exceeding expectations, and how we can do even better work in more efficient ways. As long as the goal is better effectiveness, the search for efficiency can certainly lead to innovation. A huge target for this is the multiple-level review of documents in the e-discovery process. A common practice is for a team of attorneys to handle a first-level review of the documents and then for outside counsel to re-review a certain percentage of these documents. This process is almost always ripe for efficiency, especially considering the cost of the law firm's review of the documents. But is it effective for the lawyers trying the case to only see a select portion of the documents? That's sometimes a contentious subject, but with a thorough quality control process, adept use of technology platforms and experienced attorneys conducting the initial review (especially those with deep experience litigating cases both small and large), it's become clear to us that outside counsel often needs to review decreasingly fewer documents. The key is to build an effective QC process alongside outside counsel, part of which includes having senior people on the review team who have a solid understanding of the case and who work closely with outside counsel; they understand what outside counsel is looking for to win the case and can build a process to feed them the right documents. In practice, with each ensuing matter these issues become both more efficient and more effective, but it takes a certain level of innovation to design and implement the process. So yes, I strongly believe the search for efficiency can lead to better effectiveness AND innovation. In fact, I think efforts in any of the three of these areas can benefit the others.

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