Posts by Eric DeChant
(006) Legal Therbligs: Breaking down the practice of law into measurable parts
Many of you are familiar with the Time and Motion (T&M) study, where employees are monitored or recorded performing work tasks, and a time is assessed for each iteration of the task. In an automobile factory, this could be a task such as “install tire on vehicle.” After studying multiple employees performing the same task,…
Read More(005) How to Build Legal Technology, Part 3: Navigating the Culture of Law
Before I entered the world of law, for a few years I served as First Mate aboard Lake Michigan passenger vessels. Aiding the captain with navigation, ensuring passenger safety and maintaining every mechanical system while underway, a mate’s job is a near perfect combination of responsibility, freedom and power. When I needed to sum up…
Read More(004) How to Build Legal Technology, Part 2: The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
Welcome to the second installment in our multipart series on building legal technology. If you’re looking for the first installment (Empathy, Design & Solutions), it’s right here. To sum up progress so far, we’ve identified the pain point/stated problem, and investigated root causes to confirm that the stated problem is the real one. We’ve researched,…
Read More(003) How to Build Legal Technology, Part 1: Empathy, Design & Solutions
This post is the first in a series on how to build legal technology. While LegalTech shares many attributes with its cousins FinTech (financial) and RegTech (regulations), there are many factors that make the legal ecosystem uniquely difficult to build within: ambiguous laws, regimented professional labor markets, maladapted business models and an extremely conservative resistance…
Read More(002) How to Build a Legal Engineer
Fazlur Kahn, often called the greatest structural engineer of the 20th century, created the “bundled tube” structural method when designing the world’s tallest office tower for the Sears corporation. He described his innovation to a colleague by tapping several cigarettes out of a pack and showing how the many “tubes” could be staggered and bundled…
Read MoreWhat is a Legal Engineer?
As the first city-states improved their economic leverage and military power, they enabled citizens to specialize in more learned skills and trades. Since the gods required larger temples and the generals needed bigger ships and siege engines, another guild grew alongside the scribes. Engineers planned and oversaw the erection of the great pyramids, Angkor Wat,…
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