Category: Innovation

The Legal Services Innovation Index – The Flaw in the Ointment

 

Recently Daniel Linna, Professor of Law and the Director of The Center for Legal Services Innovation at Michigan State University, published the first iteration of The Legal Services Innovation Index (LSII) The first part of this ambitious project is the Innovation Catalog of innovative products, legal services and consulting services offered by large law firms. It appears that the already impressively large catalog will be primarily managed by Linna’s law student support team and other volunteers based on their own research efforts and communal submissions. The second part of the project is the Law Firm Index (LFI) of ten innovation categories devised by Linna and his team and scored by applying a standardized set of keyword and key phrase searches of large law firm websites utilizing Google Advanced Search and recording the results counts in the LFI. The premise here is that innovative law firms will use innovation-related terms more frequently on their websites compared to non-innovative firms. The hope is that the Google search results counts will provide a reasonably objective means of measuring large law firm innovation across various temporal and demographic dimensions. Good idea…but a deeply flawed implementation. Continue reading “The Legal Services Innovation Index – The Flaw in the Ointment”

Crossing the Chasm of Innovation Adoption in BigLaw – Part 2

In Part 1 of this two-part exploration of modeling innovation adoption I introduced the reader to Everett Rogers’ basic model as modified by Geoffrey Moore to account for a chasm-like effect that occurs in technology adoption. I then applied Moore’s variant model to the adoption of enterprise search technology in BigLaw firms over the past 15 years or so. The model nicely fit the general fate of one of the pioneering enterprise search technology companies (Recommind) and described reasonably well the general market behavior of, both, law firm adopters and vendors. In this Part 2 post I look at extending the model to technology adoption inside a BigLaw firm and consider the implications for improving internal adoption of new technologies, again referencing enterprise search for examples of chasm-crossing implementation issues.

Continue reading “Crossing the Chasm of Innovation Adoption in BigLaw – Part 2”

Crossing the Chasm of Innovation Adoption in BigLaw – Part 1

 

If nothing else, the 2017 edition of Altman Weil’s Law Firms in Transition Flash Survey confirms that law firm innovation continues to merit prime coverage and legal management mindshare. While the survey finds that over 50% of the surveyed law firms are “actively engaged in creating special projects/experiments to test innovative ideas or methods,” that actually represents a slight downward tick from the 2016 survey response. Undaunted by the non-increase in activity, AW’s 2017 survey analysis highlights the innovation findings, making room in the results to do so by dropping its analysis of all other previously covered “strategic groundwork” topics. Greater mindshare is a good thing, I suppose, but until we start talking about how to establish and spread real innovation and not just “special projects/experiments,” the discussion will continue to perpetuate low expectations and fixate on missed opportunities and structural impediments. What is missing is a good conceptual framework and shared vocabulary for analyzing innovation adoption in the legal domain, but that is starting to change. In particular, Bill Henderson’s LegalEvolution.org  looks like a promising platform for exploration of the complex dynamics of innovative legal operations, practices and technologies based on innovation adoption theory. By way of supporting that effort, in this blog post I provide a brief summary of the best known innovation adoption lifecycle model and describe a well-established strategy for overcoming a critical structural obstacle to innovation. To illustrate and test the model I discuss how enterprise search technology established itself in BigLaw over the course of the past 15 years. In my next post I will show how the theory can offer useful guidance for successfully innovating inside of BigLaw firms.

Continue reading “Crossing the Chasm of Innovation Adoption in BigLaw – Part 1”