‘I feel the need, the need for speed!’ Tom Cruise exclaimed in Top Gun, but do lawyers and their clients feel the same way? And if they do, can we make a system that rewards quick work? First, does speed matter? In many areas of life speed matters a lot. Concorde cost a lot more than usual aircraft at the time precisely because it could get you from London to New York in just under 3 hours. Google’s search query responses are almost instantaneous, if you had to wait 10 minutes for a response would it be the leading search engine? Knowing that X restaurant on Uber Eats can get your food to you in 15 minutes rather than 45 may well be the difference between choosing that provider over another. While if a doctor took a few months to tell you what you were suffering from (and thus able to find a remedy), rather than hopefully a day or so, then people would not just be upset, there would…well, there would be less people. So, yes, speed clearly matters to us for a host of reasons. But, do people want legal work to be completed faster? Again, the answer has to be a resounding: yes. Have you ever met a client that said: ‘Don’t worry how long the deal takes, the company and its investors are in no hurry at all to get on with running our business, we love just waiting around for the legal work to complete. Please, take as long as you like’ ? Probably not. What you may have heard is: ‘Look, we know this is super-critical, so please take the time you need.’ But, that’s not the same thing. People understand that legal work, especially on complex matters with multiple parties, takes time, and rushing, i.e. moving so fast you may make errors, is not a good idea. And yet, if the same or better result could be achieved, i.e. risk levels were the same or lower, and the legal part of a transaction could happen much faster, wouldn’t clients leap at it? Of course they would. Stay Ahead of the Financial Trends with Our Latest FinTech News Updates!  Source: https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2025/01/13/what-if-lawyers-were-rewarded-for-speed/