As the above syllabus excerpt suggests, there is now a law school course on how innovation diffuses in the legal industry. This new ground is being tilled at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, where I am visiting this fall. It is one of the few courses at Northwestern Law that enrolls both JD and
Currell on Convergence and Preferred Provider Panels (028)
One of the biggest stories over the summer of 2017 was an open letter from 25 general counsel announcing that they are working together to test industry assumptions about the legal market. Although the composition of this group is very impressive, it is also not random. Each company is a member of AdvanceLaw, a
A Successful Legal Change Management Story (027)
Among the many impressive finalists for this year’s ILTA Innovation Awards, the submission for the Telstra legal department stood out as a compelling change management story. By enabling the right kind of collaboration among its lawyers, the Telstra change initiative reduced the internal workload on the 220-lawyer department by 40,000 hours. Further, by returning
“Crossing the Chasm” and the “Hype Cycle”, Part III (026)
Do academics and practitioners believe they have much to learn from each other? If we look for evidence of meaningful exchange — shared conferences, the prevalence of journals that appeal to both groups, or just the quantity and quality of listening that occurs when both are in the same room — the answer appears to
“Crossing the Chasm” and the “Hype Cycle”, Part II (025)
In Part I (024) of this series, I introduced Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm framework. In Part II (025), the goal is to apply it to a contemporary example of a high-tech company selling to legal departments. Part II then finishes the chasm framework and discusses some of the special challenges of applying
“Crossing the Chasm” and the “Hype Cycle”, Part I (024)
The two figures above reflect frameworks that are widely used within the technology industry to grapple with the treacherous nature of high-tech product development.
Figure 1 is the 2017 Hype Cycle, which is published by Gartner, a large international research company that helps CIOs and other IT professionals understand and evaluate emerging technologies.
Public Event: Soft Skills for the Effective Lawyer (023)
Legal Evolution PBC is pleased to announce our first public event. On Tuesday, October 10, author and researcher Randy Kiser of DecisionSet® will give a lecture and Q&A session based on his recently published book, Soft Skills for the Effective Lawyer (Cambridge University Press 2017).
This event is graciously hosted by Chapman and Cutler LLP
Inside the Client’s Head: 2017 CLOC Institute Programming (022)
The graphic above is a breakdown of the 76 sessions at the 2017 CLOC Institute. Since there were seven concurrent tracks, it was impossible to attend more than a small fraction of the total programs. Nonetheless, if one wants to understand the mindset and priorities of corporate legal departments, there is hardly a better
The Legal Services Innovation Index (021)
Earlier this week came some unexpected good news for the legal ecosystem. Dan Linna of Michigan State Law unveiled the Legal Services Innovation Index, which provides some very interesting and compelling measures of innovation by: (1) country, (2) practice area, (3) type of innovation, (4) firm size / global segmentation, and (5) individual law
Change Agents and Opinion Leaders (020)
The chart above, drawn from Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations Fig. 7-1 (5th ed. 2003), shows the adoption of hybrid seed corn by farmers in two Iowa communities. The dashed line on the bottom shows the number of adoptions by year. The solid line on top shows adoption on a cumulative basis. The first farmer