The other night I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend the FT’s Innovative Lawyers 2013 (US) awards ceremony at the New York Public Library’s main Fifth Avenue and 42nd branch. (The report was published here the next day in the paper, and you can download a PDF here.)
Since this is now an annual event—this year marks the fourth time they’ve done it in the US—it’s an occasion to step back and see how the conversation has evolved. Here’s the quite telling final paragraph of last year’s introductory piece, following a lengthy series of vignettes/anecdotes from managing partners about “buggy whips,” “new market dynamics,” “requiring behavior to change,” “opportunities to innovate,” “the wow factor,” and “adapting to the moving cheese”:
All the chairmen of the top firms talk about change and the need to “not fight the last war”. And yet at the same time they cannot, they say, see their firms being all that different in five years’ time.
How much innovation were firms really prepared to engage in last year? I rest my case.
Continuing into the articles about the meat of innovation last year, one apiece is devoted to:
- identifying ways to make sure corporate deals get regulatory approval;
- working offensively and defensively with patents;
- helping clients themselves “become more innovative;”
- extending techniques of debt restructuring from the corporate arena to entire countries (Exhibit A: Greece);
- enhancing associate training and experimenting with secondments;
- getting serious about alternative fees;
- fighting class actions; and
- advising on partnership and corporate structures for exploiting shale gas.
Maybe I’m jaded, but I find this all a bit underwhelming; aren’t these things law firms should always be doing? Granted, they may—we can stipulate they are—going about these particular tasks in innovative legal ways, but that’s not what I have top of mind when I’m on a quest to uncover innovation in “the business of law” (as the FT puts it).
Let me hasten to add that this is not the FT’s fault in the least; each year they receive an ever-increasing number of submissions (now well into the hundreds), and I’m sure they diligently select the standouts from the pack. It’s just that this is the type of raw material law firms give them to work with.
So has the needle moved in the past year?
The same sense of being radically underwhelmed hit me. it felt different to the earlier UK based awards too. different levels of innovation? Up to a point, I suppose. different audiences for the reports too?
I can understand you feeling underwhelmed but the question to ask is, how much innovation can we get on a per year basis?
This is like the idea that values can only go up and never come down. Sure it might seem a little underwhelming but nothing goes up forever.
It’s more like a sine wave some times things are truly innovative and spectacular but other times there needs to be the quiet moments to give innovation a chance to germinate.
Bruce — you are so right. What largely passes as innovation in the legal community is similar to a a screen door on a submarine. The industry as a whole is not just built on, but depends upon, inefficiency perpetuated by client fed fear of uncertainty and legal service provider massive resistance to change. The law firm industry itself will not change because it can’t — the structural resistance and impediments in current firm compensation and governance makes such radical business model change nearly impossible. Mergers will continue, but they will focus on increasing revenue as opposed to reducing costs — and as such, they will create large entities where those structural impediments are magnified as opposed to addressed.
This is an industry ripe for the creative disequilibrium of new legal service delivery models. Whether arising from Axiom, RIverview, Clearspire, Valorem, Summit, PLC or others, a category killer will emerge that will shake the foundation of the industry. Big Law will survive in some form, and Boutique Law will prosper in others, but the mass of work will be done in the future by highly efficient legal factories where the normal blocking and tackling most clients need on a daily basis will be delivered by ai-driven expert systems. The truly distinguishing feature of lawyers — their judgment — will continue to be needed, but not for everything we today call a legal issues.
As the industry migrates to more efficient providers for the lower boxes in my 2×2 legal services model (process and content), the need for upper boxes will simultaneously wane and undermine the cost structure of most firms. It will be an ugly and uneven transition for those caught in the paralysis of the status quo — but the transition itself is inevitable.
As Confucius might have said — the answer to the problem is simple — but those with the power to solve the problem find it quite difficult.
Cheers — Jeff
The brilliant and iconoclastic Tim Bratton also had a few thoughts about the FT’s Innovation Awards–Bruce.
International expansion, brainstorming sessions and competition advice are not examples of innovation, says Tim Bratton
As one general counsel put it to me recently: “The reset button has been pressed on the legal profession.” But while the button has certainly been pressed, the machine has not yet rebooted.
If one needed to look for evidence of the reset, it was given by Mark Harris, CEO and founder of Axiom Legal, who received a special achievement award at the FT Innovative Lawyers Awards in October.
If anyone had suggested 10 years ago that in 2013 a US start-up would be winning legal awards ahead of – and, more importantly, winning work from – the magic circle and other leading City firms, they would have been laughed out of the Square Mile.
But if one wanted to look for evidence that the machine has not yet rebooted, then it’s worth taking a closer look at a few of this year’s other FT Awards entries. While many were truly innovative – and congratulations must deservedly go to the winners – a handful strike me as ‘business as usual’, not innovation.
Examples include ‘providing cutting-edge competition advice’, holding ‘a one-day brainstorming session’ and ‘international expansion’. Entries such as these demonstrate that while the words ‘legal profession’ and ‘innovation’ are not quite paradoxical terms, they do not always fit comfortably into the same sentence.
Many leading thinkers and practitioners have talked about the systemic changes experienced by the market over the past 10 years. But if firms continue to submit ‘business as usual’ entries for the UK’s leading legal innovation awards, it surely illustrates just how far the profession has yet to travel on its innovation journey.
It is too easy to lay the blame solely at the door of the legal service providers. But, barring a few exceptions, any firm that thinks it can continue to rely on a model that is simply the continued provision of traditional legal services will at some point suffer a rude awakening.
The market’s new ‘disruptor brands’ such as Axiom and Lawyers on Demand (LoD) are here to stay. As clients realise the benefits that flexible legal resourcing can bring to their teams and organisations, many leading law firms are reassessing their offerings and adapting to these new upstarts. They are doing so either by entering the market themselves or accepting the business case for working with those alternative service providers on some projects.
Ultimately, though, the providers will not reshape the landscape themselves. Clients will play the instrumental role in making sure that supply meets demand.
While clients understandably demand ‘more for less’, the most innovative general counsel are also open minded about how they are willing to work with their legal service providers. More for less with no change to service provision simply will not work. More for less with structural service change will.
Over the past seven years, LoD has seen that many clients are already alive to this and client demand had led to significant disruption of the legal marketplace. LoD was an early-stage service that was conceived to meet that early disruptive demand, but we are now facing the challenge of seeing who wants to disrupt the disruptors.
Whether launched as a standalone service or with the backing of an international law firm, there is an ever-lengthening queue of alternative legal service providers eager to compete. LoD’s secondment model remains an innovation success story, but we know we won’t ‘win’ unless we continue to evolve our service offerings and pricing structures in line with market demand and increased competition.
‘Put yourself in the client’s shoes’ is a constant LoD mantra and service development is a daily theme in our office. While services like LoD’s are forcing global law firms to reassess their business models and not rest on their laurels, competition from the other flexible resourcing services means we at LoD are constantly evaluating out product to make sure we continue to match client demands.
I’d like to think that, as the FT Awards evolve, the bar will be set much higher and we won’t see even a handful of ‘business as usual’ entries and instead will see people and practices pushing the boundaries of innovation. To make this happen, the profession (both suppliers and clients) needs to think about what it wants the future to look like.
As Harris put it on the night: “Bigger is not better; better is better.” Indeed, but what is better? That is a question law firms, alternative providers and in-house lawyers all need to answer. Because if they don’t, someone is going to answer it for them and they will lose far more than the chance of winning an award. Change does not happen by talking about innovation – it comes through creative thinking, brave steps and hard work.
Once the machine does fully reboot, the game could be up for those who don’t play better. But the good news is that those who embrace change – however uncomfortable they feel at first – have the potential to be game-changers. I see plenty of opportunity ahead.
Tim Bratton is practice development director at Lawyers On Demand and blogs at thelegalbratblawg.