Disrupting Without Destroying: ILTACON 2019
After a whirlwind week, ILTACON 2019 attendees are heading home, and we’re recapping highlights of the conference. Notable ILTACON sessions included the Disruption on the Front Lines workshop hosted by Zena Applebaum, Thomson Reuters director of Market Insights & Engagement for Legal and Tax & Accounting Canada, and Ginevra Saylor and John Alber.
Their workshop – the third in the conference’s Disruption Series – was a real-time collaboration exercise, where litigation support and legal ops professionals were presented with a fictitious law firm’s problem to solve.
The workshop opened with a video set in a conference room of the law firm of Finneran, Ingalls, Bain and Seeger (FIBS). Workshop attendees were asked to imagine themselves in the conference room – in whatever role they’re in at their current job – with the firm’s chairwoman; CFO; head of Litigation; and relationship partner of a long-standing client, Marfin Financial, a national-scale mortgage lending institution expecting to be hit with thousands of individual lawsuits due to its mortgage foreclosure practices.
The video walked through a scenario: Marfin offered to let FIBS in on 4,000 of the cases. The firm’s concern was Marfin putting a ceiling on what they would pay for each case – a fixed fee set at one-third of what FIBS usually charge for such cases.
The video concluded by asking workshop attendees to solve FIBS’ problem: How exactly do you propose that we make money charging a third of what we usually charge?
Attendees then went through a series of questions, designed to help them apply the disruption tools and skills learned in the first two Disruption Series sessions. Applebaum explained three key takeaways from the session:
- Ask questions before attempting to find solutions.
- Hone soft skills to lead people through disruption.
- Technology is not the answer; it is a vehicle for change, but the bigger questions are strategic.
To watch the video that kicked off the session, download it here. Watch Legal Current for more ILTACON session highlights and recaps.
