Guides and Books

Guides and Books

Books

Scott Kelly, one of the co-founders of Afterpattern, a developer of document automation and other product development tools, has written an excellent  introductory guide on “How to Build Legal Products.”

Margaret Hagen, the Director of the Legal Design Lab at Standford Law School has released this Guide: Law by Design, which is helpful in thinking about law product design. Ms. Hagen is a pioneer in the field of legal application design.

A Lawyer’s Guide to Chatbots by Bryter. Bryter is a no-code automation platform designed for the legal profession.

Stephanie (Dolin) Kimbro, Limited Scope Legal Services: Unbundling and the Self-Help Client. This is the most comprehensive introduction to the concept of “Unbundled Legal Services”.  One pathway to success is to define an automated legal service as an unbundled legal service. Read this book to get an understanding of the “unbundled legal services concept.” See also: The American Bar Association Resource Center on Unbundled Legal Services.

Jack Newton, The Client-Centered Law Firm (2019). A new classic by the co-founder of CLIO. It’s time to organize your firm around clients, not lawyer needs.

Tom Martin, Automation Is Your New Key Differentiator: how no-Code Legal automation Platforms Can help Lawyers thrive

Hugh Logue, Automating Legal Services, – Justice Through Technology (2019), This book was published by the Law Practice Division of the American Bar Association, It is authored by Hugh Logue, a London-based consultant for Outsell, Inc., a research and consulting firm, so it reports on many UK-based programs and experiments in automating legal services. There is a lot that can be learned about law firm innovation in the United Kingdom, particularly since it has de-regulated the legal profession and is not subject to the constraints to innovation that exist in the United States.

Eisha Armstrong: Productize: The Ultimate Guide to Turning Professional Services into Scalable Products (2021) There are a few books on the subject of productizing a service. Here is one that is an excellent guide to the subject of productizing a service, although it doesn’t focus on the legal industry.

Courses

There are only a few online courses on productizing legal services. but they are a good starting point if you want to learn about the subject of productizing the law.

Check out:

Articles

Dorna Moini  founder of Documate: Building Legal Products: Turning Legal Services into Legal Applications

Marc Lauritson, founder of Capstone Practice. The Legal Document Automation Decision. (2016).

Theory and Principle, See series of articles published to Medium on this subject.

Other Relevant Resource Centers on the Web

The American Bar Association Resource Center on Unbundled Legal Services.

The American Bar Association Resource Center on the Future of Legal Services.

Codex – Stanford Center for Legal Informatics

 

Companies and Consultants That Will Help Launch Your Law Product or Automated Legal Service.

Capstone Practice, Inc., founded by Marc Lauritsen. Marc and I were co-chair of the eLawyering Task Force of the American Bar Association and is my go to expert on document automation. He has been developing custom applications for many years and his company works on many of the most popular platforms.

Theory and Principle – a leading law product development consultancy founded by Nicole Braddick. I worked with Nicole on an American Bar Association project several years ago before she founded her own firm. She is the consummate professional and a pioneer in architecting the development process for digital legal applications. If you have a larger project, Theory and Principle should be the first place to start your discussion. It is one of the few companies today that specialize in the creation of law products.

Dennis Kennedy is a legal technology pioneer and early advocate of productizing legal services. Also a co-founder of Exponential Lawyer.

  • “At the heart of each example is taking a service or set of services traditionally done by time-based billing for a single or limited number of clients into an “information product” that can be licensed or sold to a much larger audience than the client base. The result is a new revenue stream that can be added on to the traditional services model.” See Productization of Legal Services – 2014 Version by Dennis Kennedy, who is an early advocate of this concept.

Will Hornsby is one of our leading experts on ethical and regulatory issues that arise from the distribution of law products whether by law firms or companies. He also has decades of experience in helping law firms deal with ethical issues that arise from the delivery of online legal services. For many decades, Will was Counsel to the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services. He is the author of Marketing and Legal Ethics: The Boundaries of Promoting Legal Services.

Afterpattern Offers a full-scale development service from idea to launch in a few weeks  —  utilizing its own development and document automation platform. The estimated costs are between $2,000.00 and $5,000.00.

LawDroid – If you want to build a chatbot without coding.

Josef – Josef is an Australia-based company that offers a no-code legal document automation platform that can be used for a variety of tasks: creating bots; automating documents; automating intakes; and other law firm critical tasks. They recently opened a London office and have raised 3.5 million in venture capital.

Neota Logic – one of the original expert legal systems platform, Neota Logic now offers a powerful no-code platform that automated documents, creates expert systems, create legal bots, and can be used for any number of client-facing automation tasks. Neota will provide services to build and host your application.