Sometimes, to protect and promote the long-term interest of stakeholders, leaders have to take difficult public positions. The decision won’t be popular or clearly right at the time, yet the risks of deflecting or avoiding a firm stance are just too high, at least for the collective.  For legal education, one of the best examples of this type of leadership occurred in 2014 when Dan Rodriguez was serving as President of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS).  
Continue Reading Introducing contributor Dan Rodriguez (076)

“In hindsight, the new solutions are all going to look obvious” — Paul Lippe, circa 2010

Sometimes a technical innovation languishes on the innovator’s shelf despite working perfectly and doing everything the innovator hoped. What’s missing is a business model that can coordinate a fair exchange of value.
Continue Reading PartnerVine and the Last Miler’s Club (072)

Innovation hype is alienating too many practicing lawyers. This is because we forgot that lawyers innovate in the realm of substantive law.  It’s time to fix that.

Last year I was at a conference on law firm innovation organized by the Ark Group. To close things out, the event’s chairperson, Patrick McKenna, walked attendees…

Working class solutions work just fine for me.

To celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary, my spouse (Mary Henderson) and I did something we had never done before: we booked a long overseas leisure trip.  We got married in 1993 when I was a firefighter-paramedic for a suburban Cleveland fire department and Mary was…

Photo by Louis Reed via Unsplash / Microsoft is bringing the scientific method to legal innovation.

Microsoft is pushing legal buy and provider engagement to the next level and asking their primary firms to come along. Here’s why it matters: they’re thinking bigger, committed for the long haul, and bringing a STEM mindset to legal innovation.

Continue Reading Huge, If True: How Microsoft’s Big Ideas Could Transform Legal Buy (069)

Microsoft’s legal department has the talent, resources and vision.  With enough time, a “Microsoft system” could evolve that will be as influential as the original Cravath system.

I was very fortunate to be invited to the most recent Microsoft Trusted Advisor Forum, which took place on September 20 at Microsoft’s Redmond campus. The Forum featured…

Big corporations are growing faster than the rest of the economy. It is not hard to figure out where this is going. Lawyer acceptance is different story.

Many lawyers and law firms claim to serve the middle market, often describing how they deal directly with owners and executives rather than in-house counsel. Although these clients…