Monthly Musings Edition #7
“Legal innovation is a change made to a legal practice that results in the lawyers delivering better value to their clients” Arthur Wilson, LL.B., LL.M.
Hello everyone,
For my seventh ‘Monthly Musings’ edition, I’d like to share my thoughts on ‘legal innovation’ in the legal industry.
I was very lucky to be invited by Professor Paul Burgess from Monash Law School to present to his ‘Technology Design and Innovation in Legal Services’ students last week. My presentation included defining ‘legal innovation’, discussing how to determine the nature of true legal innovation, and outlining some of the main barriers the legal industry faces in regards to being truly ‘legally innovative’ in their legal service delivery.
On the 17th April 2019, in a post on LinkedIn, Art Wilson described ‘legal innovation’ as ‘a change made to a legal practice that results in the lawyers delivering better value to their clients’. He then went on to describe what isn’t legal innovation, highlighting what I think a lot of law firms today would like us to believe is being ‘legally innovative’.
This included lumping ‘legal innovation’ as a function of a marketing team within a law firm; heading up a firm’s ‘legal innovation’ department with someone who has never practiced law before; implementing a legal technology solution and claiming it is ‘innovative’; and my personal favourite, spending a huge amount of overhead, money and time on an innovation project that can’t actually be tied to any corresponding benefit to their clients.
In order to decipher whether a solution or project was ‘truly innovative’, Art came up with an equation that could determine the nature of the legal innovation. He called this ‘The Legal Innovation Equation’ and it is as follows -
‘legal innovation = lower costs x increase client benefits + improved client experience’
By deploying this equation, it ensures that law firms truly understand the ‘why’ and the ‘nature’ behind the legal innovation, and it avoids legal innovation becoming tokenistic, a marketing or PR ploy, or an exercise just to retain and attract (and occupy) junior talent within a law firm.
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But even if you are a firm that wants to be ‘truly legally innovative’, there are some major challenges lawyers have to overcome that are systemic and inherent in our training, mindset and identity.
One such barrier is the traditional lawyer mindset, which can be characterised as largely risk averse, not open to ‘failure’ or experimentation, and is not naturally self-disruptive.
The traditional partnership model is another a huge barrier to legal innovation, as most often or not, traditional partners put legal innovation into the hands of non-legally trained staff and junior lawyers. For legal innovation to be truly innovative it requires buy in and real input from the top down, so it must be led, and delivered, with partners involved at every stage of the implementation.
Most traditional partners, if they were being really honest, also view ‘legal innovation’ as a cost rather than an investment to the firm, and therefore resources, time, human power are often limited and the project isn’t taken seriously at partnership level.
But in my opinion, the biggest barrier to legal innovation is the billable hour model. If a lawyer believes that their only value to their clients is selling their time, then it is very hard, if not near in impossible, to even start to think about how and why you should innovate your legal service delivery.
This is because the billable hour model offers no incentive to value add or make your legal service more efficient or cost effective. It just relies upon a continuous cycle of time recording and billing, leaving no room or inclination to be creative, collaborative or curious about your client’s experience of your legal services and how to innovate it.
In summary, for legal innovation to be truly innovative, law firms must be prepared to take risk, collaborate, have an open mindset to failure and imperfection, be prepared to invest money, time and human resources, and above all be dedicated to ensuring that the legal innovation has an end benefit and value to their clients.
Thank you for reading my ‘Monthly Musings’ for November! I look forward to sharing more of my insights and learnings about legal technology and the progressive legal industry with you all next month.