The nuances of law new are many, but the concept typically describes legal service delivery that focuses on benefitting clients through creative and efficient means. This form of practice may be delivered by non-lawyers, is typically staffed by people not on a partner track and is often overseen by leadership that is different from what you’d find in a traditional law firm. It is a form of practice that can help your organization meet its business goals, generate revenue and provide value to your client base without jeopardizing the core competencies of your legal department.
Law new is a concept that has gotten much attention in recent years, often linked to the terms legal innovation and alternative legal service providers (ALSPs). These terms are used interchangeably, but they don’t fully capture what is happening in the industry. This is because the term “law new” refers to a broader shift in how legal services are delivered that is delivering real change and impact to the end users of legal products and services.
To achieve this, legal delivery must undergo a paradigm shift from internal to customer-centricity. The most important aspect of this is changing legal service delivery from a focus on providing legal services for its own sake to delivering legal services with a clear and tangible return on investment to its customers. The most effective way to produce this change is to empower and reward legal buyers as partners in the process, rather than preserving legacy delivery models that produce high net promoter scores only for lawyers and their traditional stakeholders.
This paradigm shift will be driven by two main sources: large-scale legal buyer activism and corporate Goliaths with the brand, capital, know-how, customer-centricity, data mastery, technology platforms, agile multidisciplinary teams and footprint in/familiarity with the legal industry to accelerate the process. In the latter case, these companies will have a strong desire to leverage their scale, scope and expertise to deliver legal services in innovative ways that create significant business impact, free up time for cross-functional enterprise colleagues and enable faster, more informed risk assessment and decision making.
The United States has a constitutional, statutory and regulatory legal system. A law is created when a bill is introduced in Congress, either in the House of Representatives or the Senate, and then goes through a process of research, discussion, changes and voting. New laws are also made by local governments, including cities and counties. Local laws are filed with the Secretary of State, and together with state laws, make up the New York Consolidated Laws. In addition, some laws are created by federal agencies. For example, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) has a number of programs to help federally regulated workers with student loan debt.