One upside of lockdown – no more FOMO (fear of missing out)!
No more Instagram stories of fantastic looking vacations or Facebook posts of stunning parties.
Quite the opposite, social media has been filled with all sorts of things that make me happy to not leave the house.
No amount of badly baked banana bread is going to make me jealous.
Please keep the TikTok of you dancing badly in your living room to yourself.
There’s no more FOMO because there isn’t anything to miss out on.
When you strip back the veneer we’re all doing the same things.
- Going out for our hour of exercise.
- Trying to manage the other members of our household so they don’t drive us completely round the bend.
- Cooking. Every. Single. Meal.
(Shout out to my hero of a dishwasher – the hardest working appliance of this crisis!)
It’s comforting to know that we’re the same as everyone else.
Some people are calling this recognition the ‘lockdown’ mindset.
We often run our businesses in the same way.
We’re a bit scared to be an outlier.
We’ve all heard the story of the early adopter who got burned by flying too close to the sun.
The problem is that it’s really hard to know what normal looks like and what everyone else is actually up to.
We go to conferences and hear stories of departments that seem to be doing it all with the wizardry of legal tech.
They’re using AI enabled blockchain. (Not that they can articulate what it is or how it has improved their efficiency.)
They’ve become innovative profit centres and provide strategic direction to their businesses. (Although they can’t seem to say how their work has changed.)
It creates the equivalent of legal tech FOMO. No different than looking at someone’s artful photo of their avocado on toast sitting outside their bungalow in the Maldives.
It’s also paralyzing as it can feel like there is SO much to do to get anywhere close to what everyone else has already done. It sometimes leads to not doing anything if we can’t do everything.
I’d like to suggest instead that we can and should adopt a ‘lockdown’ mindset to legal tech and recognize that most teams are in roughly the same place.
We don’t need to pretend that we’re going to reinvent the whole of the law.
At Alacrity we’re focused on how to get the most value from your external counsel relationships and would like to share the 5 things that the vast majority of teams that we talk to get significant benefit from:
- Get a budget for every matter – agreeing what you’re happy to pay up front saves far more time than trying to ‘fix’ a bill afterwards.
- Measure and track how your firms perform against their budget – refuse to pay anything above it if you weren’t notified in advance.
- Record and track if you were happy with what the firm delivered – use that feedback to guide when you instruct a firm next.
- Ask and measure how your firms are delivering against your corporate goals – how are they serving you from a diversity perspective? Sustainability? Ask them for hard data demonstrating what they’re doing.
- Have a couple of firms put in a proposal for each matter you instruct – there are lots of great firms out there. It never hurts to sense check what you’ve received and it can sometimes lead to significant cost savings.
These steps aren’t glamorous but they work and we like simple steps that deliver results.
If you’re interested, we’d love to have a chat and understand what your team has done to improve and we can share a few more things we’re hearing. I’d be extra interested in a chat if you can explain how you’ve managed to incorporate bitcoin into your contracts 😉.
Not missing out,
Christopher Thurn
Founder – Alacrity Law
