 Good afternoon and welcome to Global Report. We have back with us today Mr. Mark Cohen, who is the CEO of the Legal Mosaic, the executive chairman of Digital Legal Exchange and the catalyst in residence at the Singapore Academy of Law. Welcome to the show, Mark. Great to be back with you, Lily, thank you. Yes, I should say welcome back to the show. Again, it's 6 a.m. here, so I wish to sit on the onset that if I were to yawn any time during the show, it is me, not you. I will tell you from our first show, which was also aired at 6 a.m. your time, people who saw it marveled when I told them that it was so early for you. Well, thank you. Well, you are very inspiring and I know that every minute spent here is gonna be worth my waking up early. Now, Mark, at our last conversation, I recall broaching upon how policy makers have attempted thus far to resolve the access to justice issue. And you gave the number of 85% for United States and 35% for Singapore, meaning that 85% of those in need of legal services in U.S. have no access to justice or easy access to justice. And likewise for 35% in Singapore. So tell us today, how can legal tech bridge this gap between the law and the legal clients? Great question. Well, one way I think of course is regulatory reform. And I'm not talking about deregulation by any means, but what I am talking about is regulation that is really tailored to address those statistics, which I think we can all agree are not only lamentable from an individual perspective for people who really need legal services, but also lamentable from a societal perspective because it is very difficult to maintain a confidence, public confidence in the law if most people rightly or wrongly believe that access to law and lawyers is only available to the wealthiest among us or large companies. So how might regulators reimagine this? Well, one way they could do it is to draw a distinction between what activities require licensed attorneys and what activities are really part of ultimately delivering the business of legal services. For example, certain technological applications, certain services that could be done by other professionals not necessarily licensed attorneys and certain services that could be automated. These are all examples of ways that I think regulators should look at the panoply of tools and resources presently available. And then look to the ultimate objective of regulation, trying to balance the interests of the public with having access to legal tools and resources versus having interlopers pretending to be lawyers, not having the requisite skills and training. But clearly I think that there is too much of a protectionist bent in favor of that ends up discouraging competition to lawyers from so-called non-lawyers. There's too much emphasis on that. And I think not enough emphasis on how can we more creatively tailor regulation that's going to ensure that the vast percentage of our population have access to legal services when they need them. Now, Mark, from what you have seen so far going by what you just said, how well have alternative legal service providers been received? Well, take one very large one that operates in the retailer people segment of the market in the United States, a company called Legal Zoom. Legal Zoom now has close to 10 million customers. And these are everything from individuals to small and mid-sized enterprises. In a wide array of different kinds of legal services that do not necessarily involve engaging in a formal attorney-client relationship and all the unique characteristics of that. And Legal Zoom is a very data-driven business. It's very technologically enabled. It's very scaled, it's very efficient and it's very cost-effective. And as a consequence of those characteristics, Lily, I don't think it's a surprise that Legal Zoom's net promoter score is significantly higher than the whitest of the white shoe traditional large law firms. So I think that one could safely say that with respect at least to that example and there are certainly others. Clients or customer satisfaction is actually higher than that of most traditional legal service providers. And what about on the government side? Have they been welcoming such services? Because you mentioned protectionism. Have they been welcoming such services? Well, I think it really depends on the particular jurisdiction that you're talking about. In the United States, it's really kind of strange in that on the one hand, there are these still very protectionist regulations in place. And at the same time, there is a proliferation of so-called alternative legal service providers. I would prefer to call them law companies. That is companies that provide legal services that may or may not include engaging in the practice of law. So in the United States in the corporate segment, there's a bit of a schizophrenia that is in the corporate segment. No one is ever going to say to a Microsoft or Google, oh, your alternative legal service provider may in a hyper technical sense be engaged in the unauthorized practice of law. Well, they're not. One reason they're not is because very often these providers, if they're not engaged in practice are working under the supervision of either a law firm, a private law firm or the company itself. Now, flip that around in the individual or small business side of the marketplace, the so-called retail side, legal Zoom had to fight off not one, not two, but I believe an even dozen of state lawsuits claiming that it was engaged in the unauthorized practice of law. It won every single one of them, but at significant cost and had it not been well capitalized, it would have been driven out of business. That's just not right. Now you mentioned legal reforms. I know in Singapore, the government has been putting big money into the hands of law firms to encourage them to embark on legal technological adoption. My question now is let's say hypothetically, we have a lawyer who used to charge one client $600 for one hour of work. And with legal tech adoption, he can now do the same work in 10 minutes. In other words, he can now take on six clients instead of one client for that one hour. So my question to you is, can we not expect a lawyer to charge the six clients $100 each so that he still makes his $600 an hour? Or are we gonna end up with a lawyer that's still gonna charge $600 per client so that he now makes $3600 an hour? Well, that's a very interesting question. I would hope and expect that in a relatively short period of time, the marketplace will give the resounding answer that it's going to be $100 over six different clients. There's another element to your hypothetical lowly, which is this. One has to question whether a $600 an hour lawyer should be doing that particular task in the first instance or whether that particular task instead of being done in the first instance by a $600 more senior lawyer could be done by a younger lawyer. There has to be a questioning of, is the appropriate resource, whether it's machine or human, is the appropriate resource being deployed for the right task? That is I think something that the legal industry is increasingly being directed to reconsider, not necessarily by its own initiative or volition, but rather by clients and customers. So a lot of the change, pardon me, but a lot of the change just to wrap it up, a lot of the change is being driven from the consumer perspective, not from the provider perspective, whereas in so many businesses, they are looking for ways to make the customer experience that much more pleasing. That is the perfect question to my question. Thank you. You're welcome. Yeah, but I do have a concern. The problem arises I think when the funding, let's say if the lawyer is funding his own investment of this technology and he wants to make more per hour, I can totally understand that. But what if the funding came from the government? Because in Singapore, a lot of practice can secure up to 80% of public funding for tech adoption. What if that funding comes from the government? How can we better ensure that the masses benefit from this and not just the law practice? Well, one way to do it would be to have platforms that are not necessarily for a particular law firm, but you have much more of a kind of an Amazon marketplace that everyone could tune into. And you could have it broken down so that confidentiality, proprietary information and data could be walled off within the larger marketplace. But I think that there is a tremendous amount of duplication of effort that goes on among law firms. Why should every single law firm have to come up with technological solutions when they all are using the technology or should be using it for fundamentally identical purposes? And so I would be much more in favor where I counseling with whether it's a government or whether it's private equity, any source of capital. I would say are there ways that you would be able to consolidate this so that you don't have the same kind of repetition and sort of creating alternate systems, why not one integrated system, which could be available both to different providers as well as to consumers. I like your proposal of capitalizing on economies of skill. I think that makes perfect sense to me. A thought just came to me because back in the mid-2000s, I was involved with getting doctors onto EMRs, electronic medical records. And I recall some of them were humble, they were eager to learn, but there was a good number that found it beneath them to have to learn new technology, especially from a female from Asia. So I'm just wondering, as you go about in your work, how have you gone about convincing this million-air lawyers that what you are doing for them is of immense value to their law firm and their legal clients? How do you go about dismantling their pride and adjusting their mindset? Well, one response is that fortunately for me, I don't spend too much time trying to proselytize a law firm managing partners or others at law firms, but having said that, I have on occasion been invited to speak to groups of managing partners. In fact, every year when I go to Singapore, I do just that. And one of the things that I tell them, which I think is a big advantage that I have, is that, hey, I was one sitting in your seat. I was a managing partner of a law firm. And by the way, going all the way back to 1991, I tell a little story from my own experience, which is I had when I was formally on the management team of the nation's second largest law firm. And then I decided to create my new model law firm that grew to be significantly a large boutique firm with highly sophisticated clients. And we had three offices around the United States. And I thought to myself, it's very important that our offices be able to connect with each other in a very seamless way. This is in 1991. I want, instead of having three sets of libraries, I wanna have one integrated library that is accessible to everyone from their desk. I wanna have a centralized telephone system. And I want the client to think that I could be in any one of those places. To me, it didn't matter, but to a lot of clients, particularly in those days, it was important that they felt that I can get a hold of him. And so I spent a million dollars with one of my biggest clients, AT&T at the time. And I said, these are the things that I want you to do. This is my use case. Can you do it? What's it gonna cost me? How long is it gonna take? And 90 days later, we have all of that functionality. So I say to myself, and my clients loved it, absolutely loved it. It was the most customer friendly, customer-centric thing I could possibly do. And my question is, if I was doing that back in 1991 with a T1 line, you wouldn't be necessarily remember as you probably weren't born, but it was just a very early kind of cable, which at the time was sort of bleeding edge. And I say to myself, if I was doing that almost 30 years ago, don't you think that if all of your clients and customers are so focused on customer-centricity for their own customers? Don't you think that you should be starting to operate a little bit more as they do? They have certain expectations. They have certain demands. So I think really, Lily, there's a tremendous opportunity for a law without reinventing the wheel to make far better use of existing technology. And by the way, we keep talking about legal technology as if, yes, there are specific use cases that are somewhat unique to law, but that's not to say that we can't borrow from other technologies that already exist in business and have someone retrofit them to serve our particular use cases instead of starting from scratch. So I think we can be much more thoughtful and efficient about it. Yeah, I hate to say this, but T1 rings a log bell in my head. So I think- I think you must have learned it from an uncle or a father or a mother. Yeah, I hope so, I hope so. But while the courts here and elsewhere are talking about transformation design, I thought it would be apt for us to talk about transformation design. And just to be clear to our viewers, when we talk about transformation, we're not talking about mere automation, merely grafting technology onto very, very old ways of doing things. But what I noticed, what I want to say, Mark, is that when people gather to talk about legal transformation of the courts, I noticed that it's always the same people present. You have the lawyers, you have the judges, the policy makers, the law students, the legal technologies, alternative legal service providers. There is always, it seems, a very important voice missing. And that is the voice of the legal client, the voice of the litigant in person, the voice of the court user. So I raise this because Mark, I'm so concerned that if we were to continue with our design of a new system that only takes into account the professional voices, we are going to end up yet again with another lawyer-centric system. How can we better ensure that the voices of the true clients of the court are taken into account in this design? Well, for one thing I would certainly suggest that you be one of the spokespeople for the legal industry, because you frame it very convincingly. What other industry other than law would be so insular and have such hubris not to be able to include its customers in the dialogue of how to better deliver its services? And make no mistake about it, the court is an integral part of delivering legal services. Now there are some isolated instances of certain courts around the world actually being very proactive and providing tools, self-help tools to people involved in, for example, contract disputes where they could say this is the law on certain key issues. Here are some things that you might want to consider. And nobody said that it requires a lawyer to resolve the dispute. Lawyers may think that it's their birthright to resolve all disputes, but let's be honest about it. Legal disputes in the mind's eye of lawyers, but not all disputes have to involve lawyers. And in fact, if you look at the data, unfortunately because lawyers are so bloody expensive and so inefficient and resistant to scale and all these other things, the vast majority of litigants today, certainly in the United States and in many other countries around the world, the vast majority of litigants, particularly in smaller cases involving the maybe important issues to the principles, but they involve a lesser amount of money. One or both sides are proceeding on their own without the benefit of a lawyer. It's particularly, I think, unfortunate to the point of being obnoxious where one side can afford a lawyer and the other can't and exploits that advantage. That is not the way the law should operate. So to your point, I could not agree with you more that it is absolutely essential, there should be virtually no conversation on modernizing courts and dispute resolution without first hearing the perspective of its prospective customers. I can't agree more because ultimately, we want the digital transformation to be successful, right? And in order for it to be successful, it has to take in account of the experience of the court user. I'll just raise a quick example. For example, here in Singapore, right after the hearing, I don't see any active solicitation of feedback while the experience is still fresh in the mind of the litigants. I mean, there is a website somewhere, if you go dig for it via the internet, there is a feedback repository somewhere where you could submit your feedback, but I think it has to be more proactive. As you mentioned, some other courts are doing it, so I can't agree more. And by the way, that's a great word to use, proactive. That is one of the things that historically lawyers have not been. They have not been proactive. We are living in a world where one must be proactive. Every other business is very proactive, and what is their central focus on satisfying the customer, on anticipating what the customer wants now and anticipating what they might want next? That is what makes companies like Amazon, the colossuses that they are, is that they are based on customer centricity in the truest sense of the word. And a note to lawyers in the audience, if you acquiesce to client demand, that you cut your legal fees or take a discount, that is not client centricity. Yeah, and if I may be so audacious as to add, had it not been for this monopoly, I think a lot of the legal services would have been redundant by now. I quite agree with you. Now, Mark, I also want to talk about improving the court system. Have we given thoughts to that? Because one of the question I posed during your session with Richard Soskin at the Tech Law Fest was how we can also leverage technology, not just to enhance efficiency, but also to enhance transparency and fairness of the court system. Have you guys looked into that? Have you looked into that? Well, Richard is actually doing a little more work in that area than I, so maybe I can convince him to come on your program and you can take a deeper dive into that. But I would just simply say that, there is a tremendous untapped opportunity that I think the legal system has to be able to do things like that. Likewise, why can't the judiciary take a much more active approach in terms of its use of data? Publishing information that might give prospective litigants a clear roadmap of the likelihood of success under a certain set of circumstances. Roadmaps on any number of things. I mean, think of the amount of data that courts have and all the data that could be meaningfully mined and used for good purpose. But it seems that there's not much focus on that. We really need a truly fresh approach to this, not just sort of thinking about tinkering along the edges. Do we have video hearings or not? I mean, that's really just the very tip of the iceberg. We could be doing so much more and we must. Thank you, Mark. I'll delve deeper into that with Richard then. We have just three minutes left. So I want to touch on security issues. I imagine we have tech adoption that's bound to be security issues, data breaches, email interception, hacking, things like that. How are we developing on that front? Because what I see now is emails floating between the courts and the court users, and most of them aren't even encrypted and these emails contain very personal, very confidential information. So are we still playing catch up on the security end? I think we are. But then again, consider the alternative. The alternative is in the old days, you have very sensitive data in paper files. Someone could leave a paper file on the train as often happened. Someone could walk into an office and literally cart out files, which happened not infrequently. So they're always going to be potential for mischief. But I think if you were, to those who say, oh, using technology is going to be exposed us to greater risk, I would say the greater risk is not using technology effectively because there you're going to have a situation where you're so limited in what you can do. There's already such an enormous backlog of cases in part because we're so inefficient in the way the entire process. And finally, I would just say that I think we should start thinking the legal industry should be thinking of courts more as a process than a place. Why do you have to go to a particular building? And we're a particular costume to get involved in this process in today's world. What you're really seeking is knowledge and fairness and transparency and access. These are the things I think that we should be building the modernized court system around. Well, thank you so much, Ma. It's been such a privilege talking to you. I can listen to you forever, but I think if we don't take a proactive approach to depart the studio might just kick us off. But yeah, before anyone forgets, I just wish to state again that justice is a public good, just like water, just like electricity. It cannot be so costly. It cannot be so time consuming and it doesn't have to be so unintelligible. So I appreciate you, Mark, for being a part of the solution towards resolving the access to justice issue. Thank you so much for your time and the sharing of your expertise. My pleasure, Lily. Thank you.