Those who wish to succeed in the future must focus on helping clients’ businesses to make and save money. They can do so by understanding that their role is to remove unnecessary lawyering (and so true cost), to empower clients to become more self-sufficient in the traditional legal space, and to offer insight and guidance to inform clients’ businesses.
Superb global human lawyering in more complex areas, delivered by people deploying their experience, empathy, and interpersonal skills will remain necessary. We will not see machines replace such skills for many years, if ever they do.
Lawyers should be proud of their intelligence, resilience, adaptability, skills and experience. They can provide excellent 21st century legally based services to clients that benefit their clients’ broader businesses. They need a determination to be once again seen by clients as worthy business advisors and not mere service suppliers.
They should create a healthy symbiosis, not behave virally.
So, can I offer an example of such an approach?
The strategic 21st century business adviser
Kennedys’ global reach has enabled new thinking and generated new ideas and best practice that would otherwise have remained undiscovered. Such new thinking is regularly deployed in jurisdictions and product lines often thousands of miles from an originating thought.
Consequently, we have driven our innovation globally, for the benefit of our clients, locally.
This has required a multi layered approach. We have created an Innovation arrow, a concept piercing our industry far deeper than I could have imagined.
Kennedys Innovations – the beginning
The Kennedys Innovation Group was created in 2016. It was originally made up of three separate strands of the innovation arrow, each tasked with working together and tasked with helping those clients and their customers to either make or save money.
Collectively, the Kennedys Innovation Group horizon scan, identify emerging risks and trends. They empower our clients to look further along the business road ahead - and over the future hill - than would otherwise be possible.
The Group is required to be resolutely client focused. All three strands are required to operate globally and to gather the best ideas from every one of the available 30 plus jurisdictions, and to deliver those ideas in a focussed, locally relevant manner back into each of those jurisdictions. All three strands weave legal expertise into their solutions:
The final scene
Lawyers and insurers share a number of challenges.
Our customers hope never to need our actual service and often hope to be buying no more than reassurance.
Historically our industries’ customers have both bought on a mixture of price (mostly) and service / pedigree (if we are lucky). In either of our cases - when we are both needed it is often at a moment of crisis – at a moment of truth.
Both professions therefore need to ensure that we are innovative not just in the attraction of customers but also – when that moment of truth comes – the delivery of our service. Working together, in a healthy symbiosis, we can both ensure we deliver to customers when it really matters.