What Can Tax-Preparation Software Teach Legal Project Managers?

Wouldn't it be nice if when planning your legal project, your matter-management software prompted you with questions and suggestions that draw upon your firm's collective pool of experience and body of knowledge? Tax preparation software offers such functionality to assist people preparing tax forms, but this would clearly be impossible for the planning of an entire complex litigation...or would it?

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently developing software to help military-mission planners make better decisions. The mission-optimization software program is titled OBTW, initials for \"Oh By The Way,\" and is inspired by the guided decision-making featured in tax-preparation software:

\nOBTW is inspired by modern software systems (e.g., tax preparation packages) that are\ncapable of guiding novice users through a complex problem-solving environment to\nproduce expert-level results. In the case of tax preparation software, tax code expertise\nis encoded and made available through a question-and-answer interface that enables\ntaxpayers who possess only a very limited knowledge of tax code to produce tax returns\nthat would otherwise require an expert-level understanding of tax code. The OBTW\nprogram seeks to extend this model to mission-planning environments that, unlike the\ntax domain, are neither well codified nor limited in scope. Still, the interface metaphor is\ncompelling. OBTW aims to develop a software capability that can engage the user and\nmake suggestions based upon stored expertise. For example, \"Under the specified\nconditions, the safest, most effective evacuation is by helicopter. And oh, by the way, if\nyou're going to use helicopters, Unit X has three that appear to be available. And oh, by\nthe way, you ought to consider flying at night, because....\"^[1]\n

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• Current systems are designed for use by planning experts and provide little in the way of support for inexperienced, newly trained users.
  
  
• Support for COA [course of action] analysis is limited. In particular, planners have very few tools to help them deal with the uncertain, incomplete, imprecise, and contradictory nature of the information with which they are provided. 
  
  
• Existing planning processes decouple planning from execution. Only a fraction of the relevant information produced and considered during COA analysis is passed on to the operational units, creating unnecessary limitations on the units' ability to re-plan and adjust during mission execution in response to the inevitable changes in circumstances.[3]

\nIn addressing these limitations, OBTW will focus on improving mission-planning tools in three key areas: 

1. Advanced User Support

The proposed software will use dialog-driven, decision-support systems that guide non-expert users through question-and-answer interaction. It will also--unlike tax-preparation software--provide end-user feedback loops by providing \" a natural mechanism for capturing, storing, and sharing plan-relevant knowledge.\"

2. Plan Interactions and Mixed-plan Adaptation

OBTW will collect and analyze new information obtained during execution, compare that to the formal representation of the executing plan, and \"continually evaluat[e] the trajectory of the plan, assessing progress against user-specified objectives, and calculating the relative likelihood of a variety of possible outcomes.\" \"Mixed-initiative\" means that users are the final arbiters of suggestions from OBTW and other users to modify plans.

3. Robust Course-of-Actions Analysis

DARPA seeks to develop \"capabilities to support rapid 'what if' analyses to allow mission planners to quickly assess and determine the impact and interaction of plan details, especially in the presence of uncertain situations and unreliable data.\"^[4]

While software exists to assist lawyers and non-lawyers assemble legal documents, we are still a ways away from the day when we'll have computers guiding us through an entire litigation. That said, there are systems we can put into place now that bring us closer to the goals outlined in DARPA's OBTW program.

First, all firms and legal departments would do well to improve the end-user support of their legal-planning systems. Do your check-lists, templates, matter-management programs, and other planning and management tools presuppose advanced legal knowledge of the practice area? Do new associates and support personnel have to spend hours re-inventing the wheel and seeking instruction from senior attorneys to accomplish what could be fairly route tasks if only the process was documented with clear instructions, check lists, and decision trees?  

Second, do you have feedback loops where those using your systems can report the reality on the ground, document their lessons learned, and submit suggestions for improving a process? Or does knowledge in your organization only run down-hill? Are your users empowered to go against the system if circumstances warrant it? Or do they cower in fear of the process and the senior attorneys who etched them into stone and carried them down from Mount Sinai?

Third, does your system include robust but nimble monitoring processes that allow you to quickly respond to unanticipated changes and turns of events. Steven Levy in a recent post to his Lexician blog highlights the importance of noticing and appropriately responding to unexpected events when responding to projects: \"On a project, . . . [w]hen something happens, don't be oblivious in the guise of staying focused. You need to understand what that something is, and what it portends.\"^[5] Good advice, but how do you ensure that your system notices, identifies, and properly reacts to the unexpected?

Advanced technology would be nice, but there is much groundwork firms and legal departments can lay now to better map processes and plan projects, create a culture of respect, and capture information and wisdom from all levels in the organization using collaborative knowledge-management tools. This can be done with technology that is readily available today and often without great cost. Most importantly, however, it requires a cultural change in organizations that traditionally have been hierarchical and suspicious of collaboration and sharing. If you don't change that culture, I suspect that even the most advanced algorithms and heuristics will prove ineffective--unless they replace lawyers entirely.