Making Big Law More Robotic

Wilson Sonsini’s subsidiary is betting on software to cut costs by as much as 90%

- Roy Strom

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), passed in 2018 and set to take effect on Jan. 1, will require an estimated 500,000 companies with annual revenue of more than $25 million to account for the personal information they’ve filed away about Californians and delete it upon request. All told, the law’s adoption will cost those companies about $55 billion in legal fees, employee training, and other compliance measures, according to an impact assessment prepared for the California attorney general’s office by Berkeley Economic Advising and Research, a consulting firm. That leaves plenty of room for savings, says Kimball Parker, especially if you can do the legal work with far fewer lawyers.

Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati is the only one of the top 50 U.S. law firms with an office in the small city of Lehi, Utah. There, Parker is the president of the firm’s year-old subsidiary, Parker’s team is pitching clients a suite of automation software to help them comply with the new law. Its document program fills out CCPArequired paperwork with a series of prompts written by Wilson Sonsini’s flesh-and-blood lawyers. Its training program will look familiar to anyone who’s had to complete electronic human resources training sessions; clients can track their workers’ progress remotely. And a third piece of software creates a digital pipeline where companies can manage requests to delete personal data.