Law new is the process of evolving a legal industry that meets the needs of the businesses and societies it serves. It’s a fluid, collaborative, customer-centric, data-backed, solutions-based, tech-enabled paradigm shift that is transforming the legal function.

It involves embracing technology and applying its capabilities to deliver more cost effective, practical, predictable solutions to previously “bespoke” legal issues. This requires collaboration within and between the legal industry’s different player sources, including legal practitioners (law firms, in-house legal departments, allied legal professionals, and the business of law); technology providers; legal ops/legal techies; lawyers and other allied professionals; legal project managers and other allied professionals; and customers and end-users. It also involves integrating legal and other professional services into the customer supply chain, erasing artificial, lawyer-created distinctions between provider sources; and collaborating with non-legal players and industries to solve complex global challenges that cannot be mastered by a single function, company, stakeholder group, or nation.

It also entails a different approach to deploying resources, from the use of self-help tools and automated software to augmented reality training for prosecutors. These tools and techniques are enabling the legal industry to improve its efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of service, thereby reducing its costs. This, in turn, allows legal consumers to afford and access legal services they need more easily and conveniently.

In addition, it includes a new focus on strategy as a key component of the legal industry’s evolution. This involves focusing on the kind of help that can be offered more efficiently and as a secondary focus to the main legal effort. It also means understanding the client’s actual and potential legal challenges and delivering the right help at the right time. Fit-for-purpose technology investments and design should be part of a strategic plan whose end game is to improve the client/end-user experience and outcomes. It’s a team sport that involves legal practitioners, technology “techies,” process/project managers, and lawyers who are skilled in leveraging data analysis to drive strategic decisions.

This bill amends NYC’s data breach notification laws to align them with requirements in New York State’s SHIELD Act, and would require City agencies to promptly disclose information regarding persons’ private identifying information that has been accessed, disclosed, or misused. The bill would also expand the obligation to disclose such information to affected persons, and require City agencies to share with other entities certain types of private identifying information, such as IP addresses and dates of service, that have been shared by a person or entity.