Why Bartenders Make Good Lawyers.

“Are you going to SIN?”

This was a question I was asked in college, when I worked as a server and bartender at local restaurants. No, this was not a friend concerned about my eternal soul. SIN was an acronym – Service Industry Night – that referred to local bars and clubs that had discount cover night for those who worked in the “service industry,” mostly referring to hospitality workers such as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and the like.

It wasn’t much in terms of corporate benefits but it was one of the few benefits we got.  It was almost always on a Monday or Tuesday. Why? Because weekends were busy times at bars and restaurants and yielded the best tips per hour worked. The fuller the restaurant capacity, the more we hustled and the more we got paid.

Funny how so many years later, I discovered that working “in service” was the best training I’ve ever had for being a lawyer.

Manufacturing vs. Service – Measuring Outcomes

After undergraduate, I worked as an engineer in semiconductors: manufacturing. Measuring outcome was easy: production yield number, cost per part, throughput times.  Easily calculated numbers that quantified the operations of the company. Our KPIs and team goals were easy to define, measure, and improve.

But then I became a lawyer. In private practice – the way most lawyers start their careers – success was judged on quantifiable measurements just like in a production environment.  Except the measurement was in “hours billed”. The firm still a need to ensure the client was sufficiently satisfied with the output (lest they contest the invoice) but rarely was there a a concern about what the client would do with the advice once it was given.  In short, no one measured client outcome – the firm’s job was to provide great legal advice. What was done with that advice was a business decision.

The Business of Law, In-House Style

Working as in-house counsel had always been my goal.  I was always curious about what happened at the clients after legal advice was provided. How was the advice implemented? Was it implement? Did it help them meet their business goals? If not, how could the advice be improved in the future so that legal was not just advising, but really helping the business achieve its objectives.  I would finally get a chance to see the impact my work had on my client. Plus, no more time sheets.

What I hadn’t anticipated was the role time sheets played in client understanding of legal services. With no more time sheets, the client struggled to measure the impact of legal.  The money paid for salaries instead of hours was about achieving partnership, impact, and outcome – and that was hard to measure. I saw the constant struggle at all levels of the legal team to demonstrate the impact we were all working towards. Every legal professional I worked with in truly wanted to be a valuable business partner, drive corporate success, and reduce legal risk so as to ensure the long-term viability of the client. Yet we struggled to define how that was done.

Enter the Favorite Proxy: “How Do You Feel?”

What did we use instead of time sheets?  The Pulse Survey. A series of questions like “On a scale of 1-5, how well does the legal team collaborate with you?” “Do you feel the legal team contributes to the success of the company?”  Companies were trying to measure the benefit of one of their highest cost departments based on how they felt. So risky in so many ways.

Completely discounting the conflicts this creates when lawyers need to give advice that individuals don’t want to hear it, this type of measurement is both subjective and unreliable. Self-focused assessments are already prone to endowment effect bias - see Kahneman & Tversky showing that those who pay for something are predisposed to believe it is valuable – and basing the success measurements on subjective inputs such as feelings amplifies this effect. The outcome of these surveys were almost always the same: of course, we feel great about teams that we invested thousands of dollars in!

Legal Tech Continues The Trend

Today’s legal tech tools continue the trend. Most recently, this was seen in a report released by Harvey AI on the “impact” of generative AI.  My initial thoughts on that “study” were posted on LinkedIn, but I wanted to share more here.  Harvey, which of course has a vested interest in making sure that people think generative AI has an impact on legal work, showcased this subjective, internally focused means of judging impact. Studded with questions like “Would you [feel] upset if this technology tool was taken away?” “Is your work higher quality now that before they used the tool?” “Do you feel more productive using AI?” or more traditional “vanity metrics” like user adoption[1], these were questions designed to showcase the success of Harvey rather than their customers.

This messaging likely has more to do with the fact that many of these companies are new and aggressively raising capital (Harvey just raised $300 million on Series E on an $8 billion valuation). These types of metrics are so valued by investors that companies can emphasize these metrics because selling the investment overshadows the need to develop a product that will actually solve customer problems and impact the customer’s bottom line.

V4 Final is Built Different

V4 Final is built for our customers. Our founders are lawyers and engineers, yes. But also former servers, bartenders, and service workers. We haven’t just studied the problems we are we’re solving, we lived them.  We know what our customers value, whether its intuitive products that don’t require days/weeks/months of ongoing training, the need to get up to speed quickly on quickly changing business operations, role modeling the standards they hold their client to, or just trying to make data-driven decisions.

In fact, we’re so confident that the V4 Final platform will drive business outcomes and impact company success that we’ve built data-based measurements into the system. If it doesn’t work, you’ll know it – not because it doesn’t feel right, but because you will have the data to show the business outcomes.  V4 Final gives insight into not just outside counsel spending and number of contracts closed, but also corporate priorities, operations information, throughput times and response rates for stakeholder and SME engagement, and the ability to track advice to full closure with the business rather than simply when the matter left the hands of legal.

We all know that legal support can be fast, cheap, and good so long as you just pick two. V4 Final wants to give you the data to know whether you’ve picked the right two.

Bartenders Make Great Lawyers

Living at the intersection of quality, speed, and cost, the bartending mentality is how we seek to serve. Being able to sling out a huge volume of cheap beers is great for a bartender that doesn’t expect to make a lot of tips. But taking the time to make a proper vesper martini while having a pleasant conversation with the customer yielded better outcomes for both the restaurant and my own bottom line.

We want to bring that level of service back to the legal industry.  Not just to make only slow, good decisions, but to understand the difference of when quick decisions are needed manage workload and when in-depth analysis and slower processes are required for the needed outcomes.

V4 Final is Different

Sure, we want to be liked as much as the next guy. And we think you’ll like us better if we are improving business outcomes. In fact, we’re so committed to the idea that you should be able to measure the ROI of the legal tech tools you buy (including ours) that we built the measurement tools into our platform. In bartending parlance (as my Irish friends know): you have to know to start the Guinness pour before everything else. Why not invest in technology that helps make sure you do that?

Join the Early Access Program.

We have a few slots left in our early access program. If your legal team could use a hand understanding and prioritizing business outcomes based on client needs, email us for help.

[1] We could do a whole other post on vanity metrics, but suggest just reading The Lean Startup to understand.