Law new is a catchall industry term for legal technology, alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) and other companies, startups and law firm subsidiaries augmenting traditional legal services. It is often used as a substitute for the more specific terms “legal innovation,” “legal ops” and “legal innovation strategies.”
While many of these entities have been around for some time, they are now getting more attention because of the rapid pace of business change occurring in other sectors and their increasing ability to produce meaningful customer impact. This is being driven by a mix of factors, including the increasing importance of business agility, digital transformation and human adaptation.
In the legal world, this shift has created a growing sense of urgency to adopt new ways of delivering legal services and collaborating with customers. But it has also been complicated by the fact that traditional law firms are not always willing to let go of their legacy delivery models, which have been in place for generations.
As a result, the concept of law new is evolving to include more collaborative models and broader collaboration between legal providers and allied business professionals on both the client service and business of the law sides of the practice. The result will be a fluid, more integrated approach to the business of law, erasing artificial, lawyer-created distinctions between legal services providers and a move to focus on customer impact that produces high net promoter scores, not self-congratulatory industry awards or profit preservation.
One example is the recent legislation in California that will require companies to publish pay data for their employees by position, gender and race, an effort to tackle what critics call the “pink tax.” Another is the newly enacted requirement that stores that sell feminine hygiene products provide a separate “men’s” section of those items so shoppers can easily find them.
The latest law new to get a lot of attention is the federal legislation passed by Congress that requires the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to create rules for people who use automated employment decision tools. The rule would require that anyone using such a tool do a bias audit first, and that they notify job candidates. The rules are published as public law (PL) numbers and can be accessed from the Statutes at Large website after being formally adopted by DCWP.