◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek December 23, 2019
25The 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
filedawayaboutCaliforniansanddeleteit upon
request.Alltold,thelaw’sadoptionwillcost
thosecompanies about $55 billion in legal fees,
employee training, and other compliance mea-
sures, according to an impact assessment pre-
pared 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,
SixFifty, which aims to deliver the quality of
WilsonSonsini’stoplegalmindsviasoftware.His
teamof 15 hastakenanearlyleadinthenascent
marketforlegalautomation by focusing on the
data-privacy law, an issue key to its parent’s core
Silicon Valley interests.Parker’steamis pitchingclientsa suiteofauto-
mation software to help them comply with the
new law. Its document program fills out CCPA-
required paperwork with a series of prompts
written by Wilson Sonsini’s flesh-and-blood law-
yers. 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 compa-
nies can manage requests to delete personal data.
All told, the services will cost a typical small
business $20,000 to $30,000 a year, Parker says,
plus a premium for regular updates. “We really
wanted to price it so that the funeral parlor in
Fresno could afford it and that it would provide
significant value for a big public company as well,”
he says.
The other options on the market tend to require
companies to combine traditional legal counsel
with software that isn’t ready to use off the shelf,
says Austin Baird, an in-house lawyer at Vivint
Solar Inc., which makes and installs solar panels
for a great many Californians. Baird became one
of SixFifty’s first customers in June, won over by
the company’s system for handling data requests.
(He says Vivint may need to respond to as many as
30 million of them.) “We ultimately decided it was
just easier to rely on SixFifty for everything,” he
says, and the savings have been significant.
Competing on price is also unusual for big law
firms such as Wilson Sonsini, whose high fees
are a sign of prestige and can be a selling point.
That’s one reason hourly rates now top $1,500 at
brand-name firms, where some partners make● Wilson Sonsini’s subsidiary is betting on
software to cut costs by as much as 90%
Making Big Law
More Robotic
THEBOTTOMLINE Directaircaptureis onlyonepartofa
kitchen sink approach to battling climate change, but the science
and costs look a lot more promising than they did a few years ago.
Ina secondloopoftheprocess,thepotassium
carbonatewillreactwithcalciumhydroxidetoform
pelletsofcalciumcarbonate.Thosepelletswillget
brokendownina high-temperature furnace into cal-
cium oxide (lime), which can be mixed with water
for use in more reactions, and CO 2 , which can then
be used to put fizz in soda, turned into a fuel, or
stored underground.
It’s a race between chemistry and time. In 2015
the National Research Council issued a report esti-
mating it could take 30 years before direct air cap-
ture removes 1 billion tons a year, and it might never
get as high as 10 billion tons a year. For comparison,
the combustion of oil, gas, and coal worldwide last
year generated about 34 billion tons of carbon diox-
ide, according to the 2019 BP Statistical Review.
But hey, you have to start somewhere. “Time is
against us,” says Global Thermostat’s Chichilnisky.
“We need to be building plants.” �Peter Coy