For most of my career I did what every dispute lawyer does: I loved my cases and clients. And I accepted that cases take years, that budgets overrun, briefs get filed at 5am and that nobody can tell the client with sufficient confidence what a dispute will actually cost or when it will end.

I remember sleeping under my desk on a filing night. My exhaustion was a given. It was a by-product of my tenacity. The penny-drop moment was waking up at 5am under my desk to an unknown woman standing over me. She turned out to be our cleaning lady. She and I had not met, and she had not expected to find a body under a desk. We both shrieked. I thought to myself: there has got to be a better way to do this.

It took me years to see it for what it was, which is a symptom of a system driven by a misalignment of interests between law firms and clients. Law firms, who do not invest in the outcome of a case, make money purely from a volume of work done. The classic example is the billable hour. The longer a dispute runs, the more money they make. Such a dispute represents to them all upside, no risk. By contrast, a client defending a lawsuit has nothing but downside. The longer a dispute runs, the more exposure it brings: legal fees, interest, lost management time, reputational risk and so forth.

If these interests were aligned, the sector would have given more thought to informed and prompt resolutions, with fewer soul-gouging all-nighters. The positive challenge: the law firms that reform their business model can evolve into the winning, apex legal providers of the next decade.

But to be honest, inefficiency isn’t the only issue. There are two others.

First, quality. The law is a talent business that does not realise it’s a talent business. The sector has historically focused almost exclusively on technical excellence while paying too little attention to leadership and human performance. The secret sauce is threefold: 

1. Deploy AI to disrupt dispute length. 
2. View your team as elite athletes who need enough sleep and time with loved ones – see for example Dr Hintsa’s book The Core, about optimising F1 driver performance. 
3. Draw on cognitive science that shows that 16 hour days produce suboptimal outcomes for clients. Switch tasks, take breaks, perform better. The result? Shorter and better managed disputes.

The final issue: data. AI mastery hinges on data mastery. Do clients and their trusted advisors have access to a holistic risk view of each dispute, so that they can make quick and informed strategic decisions?

Ask a lawyer the likelihood of winning a case and the answer lands on 60% remarkably often, because it is safely neither optimistic nor pessimistic. These estimates are intuitive and unscientific, typically not built on any framework applied consistently across a company’s disputes. Quantum assessments can be delayed and incomplete. And what about quantifying the loss of customer trust caused by the risk? Or brand damage and risk of follow-on claims? Enterprises are making decisions worth tens to hundreds of millions, and the more informed those decisions, the better for business.

If every dispute is an airplane, and you’re the pilot, what information do you need in front of you to fly safely? I think of Aavalynx as that control panel. We bring everyone onto that platform so they can make more strategic decisions, work better and resolve disputes faster. Early data suggests that Aavalynx generates a ROI of over 31x in saved damages, legal fees and interest, and 200x when taking into account e.g. broader commercial disputes rescued.