Over at Exari, it's a different Adam Smith.  OK, I couldn't resist, but this gives me an opportunity to briefly flag the importance of automating routine tasks which corporate counsel will increasingly resist paying for.   Document assembly, whether through Exari or a more familiar name-brand, Thomson-Elite, is clearly a baseline example.

The ABA Journal discusses a far more strenuous example:  Cisco System's insistence on cost-savings from its law firms.  According to Cisco's general counsel Mark Chandler, 75% of the $70-million/year they spend on outside counsel is now billed on a fixed-fee basis, and he wants that only to increase.  Like it or not, automation will be a large part of any firm's answer to the question Cisco continually poses, which is along the lines of "If you could do it for $10,000 last year, can you do it for $8,500 this year?"  Two firms that have risen to the occasion are McGuire Woods with its "ContractBuilder" database of templates, and Reed Smith with its online HIPAA compliance tool.  (It cost Reed Smith a fixed amount to build the tool, and clients can rent it for a fixed amount.)

Nor is Cisco exactly passive when it comes to driving technology-based cost savings internally:

• Through its "Click Accept" digital signature technology, it has enabled 6-million online signatures to date at a savings of $10-million.
• Partnering with Eversheds, it developed an online training and "e-learning" suite of applications on how to comply with employment laws in a host of countries.
• By migrating all its internal emails and documents to a new database—one specifically designed in contemplation of the burdens of e-discovery—it was able to dodge an estimated $9-million expense (the lowest bid by an outside EDD firm) for discovery in an unspecified piece of litigation, and cut its internal costs of compliance to $900,000.  Admittedly it cost $1.5-million to build the database, but as Chandler correctly points out, "this is the gift that keeps on giving."

Technology is not the answer to everything, of course; sometimes it pays just to look outside Silicon Valley for legal resources.  Laura Owen, director of legal services, says Cisco approached some Midwest firms for their lower overheads and billing rates and while several were receptive, others reacted to Cisco's expectations with "Very interesting...but no thanks."

Understand that what Cisco is doing today the rest of the Fortune 500 will be doing tomorrow.  Cause for alarm?  Not for a moment; do you really want to take highly competitive, verbal, analytic, expensive professionals and set them to the task of explaining for the umpteenth time the worker compensation system in the UK?  There's a reason they call it commodity work, and it's not what you really want to do, is it?  Cisco happens to agree with you.