“When defining Innovation, we can say it is just trying to improve the things that you have been doing.” explains Karol Valencia, Co-founder of Wow Legal Experience, during a recent Platforum9 session. Drawing from her experience implementing innovation in law firms, Valencia challenges conventional thinking about legal transformation.
Rethinking Skills Development
“I really like the concept of skilling and reskilling,” Valencia notes, emphasising how legal teams can leverage existing talent. She advocates for identifying hidden capabilities: “If you know that one of your lawyers is good at drawing and you need to start implementing more designs… or you need to do automation and you know someone who understands Python, then you can check who to train in certain skills.”
Process Before Technology
Valencia emphasises starting with fundamentals: “Your onboarding and offboarding processes… those are the most critical processes when you talk about the legal sector because you are giving access to your data to new people.” She warns against rushing to implement technology without proper foundations.
Strategic Implementation
For firms beginning transformation, Valencia recommends targeted rollouts: “You can start with one branch or practice area, and then that branch or practice sets up a playbook or policy that all the rest of the countries/offices/teams should follow.” This approach allows firms to learn and adjust before wider implementation.
The Role of Technology
“There are a lot of things we can do without AI,” Valencia observes, suggesting firms focus on basic automation first. She shares her own experience: “We’re going to apply AI just for the filtering process… for the rest of our product, it’s mostly going to be automation.”
Building Innovation Culture
Valencia recommends structured approaches: “Try to set up one hour during weekdays… so we can talk about potential use cases or problems and discuss how we can solve them with resources we already have.” She emphasises including diverse perspectives: “We involve at least one person of each team or different seniorities.”
Looking Forward
“The future is legal tech,” Valencia concludes, highlighting emerging opportunities for lawyers: “It’s a good opportunity, and legal tech platforms can automate processes, inviting lawyers only at the last part of its launch process… so lawyers can also make extra money outside their daily job, like a gig economy for lawyers.”
As Valencia summarises: “The ideas are already there… we just need to create them in reality.”
