January 22, 2021

legal tech technology and digital data science artificial intelligence legal analytics make law better make lawyers better

I’ve been meaning to write a few short words about Professor Daniel Linna’s work for several months. Dan’s work largely focuses on combining engineering principles and legal practice; holding chairs in both Northwestern’s school of law and its school of engineering. Earlier in 2020, Dan published a draft book chapter Evaluating Legal Services: The Need for a Quality Movement and Standard Measures of Quality and Value, destined for publication in the upcoming Research Handbook on Big Data Law.

Granted, not everyone is going to put this book on their shelf, but Professor Linna’s contribution should be required reading for the legal profession. In it, he concisely and clearly makes the case for a quality movement in the legal industry supported by standard measures of quality. In short, he demonstrated the inevitability of a legal industry where results are measured, and decisions about legal services are made based on those measurements.

Some firms are further along than others in building out the systems that allow them to collect information needed to measure results, but it’s a process worth pursuing. For example, one of the initiatives I enjoyed working on last year was designing systems for collecting firm diversity & inclusion information and the information feedback systems needed to drive industry improvement.