Is your technology enabling you through ‘baked in legal’?

Contacts: Chris Stubbs, Product manager

This is my first time writing to you from the Kennedys IQ blog, Hello everyone! 

It’s been an intense but rewarding four months having moved over to Kennedys IQ from our fraud team at Kennedys and I wanted to share some of my thoughts about what I’ve learned in that time.

The term ‘baked in legal’ is something we talk about a lot. It’s something that comes up almost daily in conversations we have with each other and clients to describe what it is we are doing and what is positioning our software to take on the market in 2021.

You will be familiar with Kennedys IQ’s ‘Kennedys, without the lawyers’, and the meaning behind this to help you use lawyers less. Kennedys IQ’s raison d’être is to enable you to do something yourselves via our software, rather than instructing a lawyer.  However, our platform relies heavily on the lawyers within Kennedys in order to capture their legal brilliance and ‘bake this in’ to our software.

As the first winner of the inaugural Kennedys’ Ideas Lab, I can testify first hand as to how successful this approach has been. 

Imagine having access to the best lawyer expertise and advice 24/7 in order to consistently make optimum decisions right from the outset – now you’re getting close to what our mission and products are all about. Creating software that purely enables a user to participate in a process and does not support them with recommendations on actions and decisions to achieve optimum outcomes simply does not go far enough or add significant value. 

If like me you have been reading as many books as you can during lockdown, and as we are now in another I recommend you read ‘The Future of the Professions‘ by Richard & Daniel Susskind. A quick quote to give you a flavour:

“Commoditization is also sometimes regarded as distasteful, as diminishing the worth of a service that can or has been reduced to routine work. It follows, if some professional tasks can be commoditized, then many traditional providers, especially the sceptics and the threatened, downplay the significance of these activities, often dismissing them as no longer worthy of their attention.  And yet dismissing commoditized work in this way ignores its value – that, from the perspective of the recipient, client or customer, it is often a good thing, bringing lower costs, greater accessibility and higher and more consistent quality of service.”

This book provides foundational concepts about how technology will transform the work of human experts and the themes throughout will reinforce your understanding of what Kennedys IQ is striving to achieve.