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Manuel Pueyo

140 lawyers speak out on the transformation of their sector in Belgium

Manuel Pueyo · Nov 30, 2020 · Leave a Comment

My name is Marnik and I have been conducting research on the legal sector. In this webinar I want to share what I discovered and have an open exchange with you on the results.

Join me if you want to know more about:

  • how law firms define client orientation
  • their needs in this changing world
  • what is blocking them to go ahead.

For who? Lawyers or managers of Law firms.

What to expect?
• We share the results of our market research that we carried out in corona times. You can expect very practical information on how 140 lawyers (in Dutch speaking Belgium) think about the transformation of their law firm.
• How do they see modern and future oriented client orientation? What do they need to start transforming or modernizing their practice? What are they afraid of and what is blocking them?
• Our objective is also to have an interactive exchange on the subject throughout the session.

When? Tuesday 15 December at 4PM

Where? Virtual session on the platform Places of Learning.

Practical?
• Register here: 

After registration, you will receive the link to connect and all further practical info.
• Session is in English.
• Duration 1hr.
• And it’s for free …

Places of Learning: A podcast on legal innovation

Manuel Pueyo · Sep 11, 2020 · Leave a Comment

A podcast for lawyers who care about the future of the sector

Brought to you by Manuel Pueyo and Marnik Vanhaverbeke

What to expect

A series of 5 episodes in which Marnik interviews relevant people on topics like client communications, process & service transformation, brand positioning, business development skills, design thinking, agile working, internal marketing and promotion, writing for the web, information architecture, email marketing, social media, emotional intelligence, career planning, mindfulness,change management, stress management, influencing, empathy and people management. Specifically covering the situation of law firms.

Episode list

Episode 1 :

Title

Content Marketing for Law Firms

Time

October 2nd 14:00

Guest

Manuel Pueyo

Description

Manuel is a Brussels based content strategist, web designer and content coach at Big Kids. In 2019, he was looking for new business ideas and he did research on the legal sector in Belgium. He interviewed 15 people and also conducted an online survey. The original question was to find out how law firms were doing web content. He ended up discovering deeper problems suffered by professionals working in the sector. In this episode we will discuss with Manuel on main discoveries from this research.

Agenda

link to see agenda

Register

Eventbrite

Episode 2:

Title

Turning Content into A Valuable Business Asset: some concrete examples in the legal sector

Time

October 9nd 2020 14:00

Guest

Manuel Pueyo

Description

Manuel is a Brussels based content strategist, web designer and content coach at Big Kids.
In this episode, second in the series with Manuel , we will discuss about innovative examples of how law firm are using content strategies to differentiate themselves from competitors. How they are using smart content as an amazing opportunity, not only to attract clients, but also to deliver better services. Content becomes a strategic business asset for the organization.

Agenda

link to see agenda

Meet the host

Marnik Vanhaverbeke has a thorough knowledge of the Belgian legal industry. As former CEO of LAR, a leading legal protection insurer in Belgium, he created his vision on the legal sector, based on many years of interaction with its main actors. He now launches himself as coach and consultant, mainly for lawyers. In that role, he targets an improved customer experience through deep client knowledge, process optimization, enlarged servicing and a clear and unique brand positioning. He will convince you without doubt that these elements are key for a successful innovation of the legal industry.

Collaboration for Law Firms: Some tips to start growing your community

Manuel Pueyo · Dec 9, 2019 · Leave a Comment

You have probably heard this before: The legal sector is going to experiment huge transformation in the upcoming years. The law firms that are going to survive are the ones who manage to put in place a collaboration strategy.

One of the key enablers of transformation is “collaboration”. In this post, I understand this term broadly: people, data and technology.

Collaboration is widely considered as one of the top XXI century skills and is often defined as your ability to work with others to achieve common goals.

This post aims to give law firms a few “things” they can start doing today to start moving towards enhanced collaboration capabilities.

Share a vision and purpose with the people you choose to collaborate with

A compelling vision inspires motivation and ensures everyone with whom you collaborate stays on the same page. You could, for example, use SALT methodology to help you get there.

Once you have this vision agreed. It is also important to visualize it! We tend to forget this in the rush of everyday tasks. The vision needs to be revisited time and time again. We need to be speaking often about it. How does it sound? What is the smell of collaboration? See it and feel it in your office. Place it shortly (but regularly) on the agendas of your meetings.

Alessandra Satta is an expert in Generative Collaboration and she likes to ask the groups she coaches to imagine if they could fast forward to 10 or maybe 20 years from now. What do they see? How does this vision that they want to create look like? What footprint do they want to leave behind?

Diversify your partners

Law firms are going to have to recruit new profiles, more familiar and open to work on collaborative modes. In fact training of law professionals must evolve. *

Lawyers tend to like to work with people that speak the same language. This often translate with lawyers only working or hiring other lawyers. This must change!

Think about ways to bring diversity to your workplace,

  • start hiring people from other disciplines (not only legal experts): web developers, service designers, facilitators, academia, visual graphic designers, historians, philosophers, startups etc
  • also think about this… if you always choose the people with whom you collaborate, is this really collaboration? Start collaborating with your competitors. But who among your competitors? This is where the vision and purpose comes in handy…I personally collaborate only with the people that share same values and vision as me. They are the ones provide the good energy I need to continue my work.

Nurture your community with multi-format events and connection opportunities

There are many ways to nurture. But think about connection as the thing that will bring most added value to your network: Create spaces for connection.

Your community has people that are doing individual actions ignoring that somewhere out there there is someone doing the same. Local actions spring up simultaneously in many different areas. If these actions remain disconnected, nothing happens beyond each locale. However, when they become connected, local actions can emerge as a powerful system with influence at higher level.

An easy way to start nurturing is to organise regular events at your offices in which you “pay the drinks” and bring an inspiring speaker with whom your “community” can have a chat.

Other possible ideas:
Open a lab, an incubator or innovation space. Example: Barclays Eagle Labs
A weekend retreat
An AMA session on Twitter (Ask me anything)
A slack channel
A newsletter with good info to nurture your tribe and keep them connected to you

APIS* are everywhere. But sharing is not always caring

Think about your knowledge as data that will, sooner or later be placed in a web format. You can start thinking now, what is your strategic knowledge that makes your own competitive advantage.

Should I share this? Here there are different opinions. Some people believe that knowledge is abundant and so it should be open. Some people believe in scarcity and they will tell you… Don’t share this or that!. It is up to you to make your own opinion and choose what you decide to open and share.

*An API is a set of code that has been written to ensure interchangeability between your system and other systems. In terms of IT if you want to stay on top you need to be constantly innovating adapting the system. Sometimes this innovation does not need to come from your own team. But you can look for resources outside: you put your data , applications or devices outside and open it up to teams outside to improve it.

Updating your skills

Legal market is changing but legal education has not kept pace with the times. As futurist Richard Susskind warns, “we are training young lawyers to become 20th-century lawyers and not 21st-century lawyers.”

One of the biggest obstacles to legal innovation in France, Belgium and Spain is a lack of qualified professionals.*

Investing in learning agility and core capabilities is as important for the individual worker as it is for the decision-making executive. Thinking openly can get us there.

At Places of Learning have a very simple and clear mission, to prepare lawyers for an ever-changing world.

In order to do that we launch a community of practice, (based in Brussels) in the field of legal design and communications. We want to encourage a culture of collaboration across professionals working inside legal firms that could benefit from sharing best practices and peer learning (horizontal / among equals).

Joining this community is very simple:

  • Just subscribe to our newsletter if you want to join and stay up to date of our events.
  • Contact me via email (manuelpueyo@bigkidscontent.com) or linkedin
  • Join our meetup group.

*Larcier study on fiscal and legal european innovation

AI startups that could make you save time in your work as a lawyer

Manuel Pueyo · Nov 19, 2019 · Leave a Comment

What are the tasks that law firms spend time doing today that could be simplified or erased via automation?

Document Review

Imagine Isabella as a corporate lawyer who works under big pressure and has to deal with deadlines to complete client reports? She, and her team, have to review thousands of documents.She spends her day scanning documents specifically looking for: meetings with representatives of other companies, email exchanges and any document mentioning other company names.

She puts all those documents in Kira, and receives a list of results or hits. She can also personally check the other documentation that did not pass the AI filter. If she manually sees documents that were important to the case but were missed by the machine she can point this out and the machine learns to extract patterns from those missed documents. The more data you have and the more tests you do the better the machine gets at doing this task.

Writing legal documents

Imagine a world in which your next financial report or blog post will not be published by a human. There are AI-powered tools that work by analyzing tens of thousands of existing pieces of content to understand a writing style. Then they replicate the style with new data to produce original content. You can see it in action in the links below
https://youtu.be/XMJ8VxgUzTc
https://openai.com/
https://automatedinsights.com/wordsmith/

You can also have an AI automating the tedious tasks of writing the minutes of meetings. See this demo by Microsoft

Automating conversations with clients

Conversations with clients are performed by a bot and demands lawyer intervention only when the bot is not capable of replying (extra expertise is needed). The lawyer is to focus only on the most interesting tasks.

Wilfried De Wever, adviser to a selected group of startups shaping the future of law, refers to Patentbot as the go to example in this field. Clients can get help with automating their IP protection much faster and at a lower rate. Partnering legal service providers can integrate this bot into their service offering and start reaping the benefits.

Joining platforms and networks of lawyers as a niche specialist

In some cases, lawyers may have very specific expertise that is not always in demand in their organization or their location. Imagine you are a lawyer or a law firm with a lot of expertise related to cryptocurrency or block chain law. For these cases, it may be worthwhile to join a platform or network that allows you to find additional clients for that specific expertise. https://legalnodes.org/ or https://legaladviceme.com/ are examples of such platforms.

tags: AI

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