In writing up the week 4 summary of “How Innovation Diffusions in the Legal Industry,” I discovered that it is near impossible to write about Axiom without referencing a larger change narrative.
Founded in late 1999, Axiom was likely the legal industry’s first venture-backed start-up. Now, 18 years later, with over 2,000 employees
On the occasion of his Lifetime Achievement Award, Legal Evolution is pleased to republish Mark Chandler’s 2007 speech, “The State of Technology in the Law.” This speech arguably marks the beginning of the current era of law practice in which large corporate clients assert more power and authority within the relationship.
At the time
Week 3 of my “How Innovation Diffuses in the Legal Industry” class focused on the crucial role of consultative sales and established distribution channels in the diffusion of innovation. The success was entirely due to our guest lecturers from Thomson Reuters, pictured above.
The value of this class, however, will not make sense
Several years ago, I was part of an experiment to bring together legal industry innovators and early adopters. To carry this off, Dan Katz, Bruce MacEwen and I pooled our rolodexes to identify folks we thought would be interested in the science of diffusion theory and its application to the legal industry. The experiment/event was the called The Forum on Legal Evolution. The name was very deliberate, as we were trying to break from the “disruptive” innovation rhetoric of the time, which we believed was neither accurate nor helpful.
Continue Reading The 2017 Forum on Legal Evolution (033)
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
Part I of this series (029) laid out some pervasive problems with law firm panel arrangements, and Part II (030) outlined the basics of how we believe those problems can be overcome through correct structure and active management. This final installment will go deeper into what we believe are the most
In the first part of this series (Post 029), we discussed why there are sometimes serious problems with the way law firm preferred provider panels are structured and managed. In particular, we often see that law firm panels:
We see many companies these days running law firm convergence exercises – generally resulting in a preferred law firm network with fewer “approved” firms than the company previously used. The goal of this exercise is usually to reduce total legal spending and simplify outside counsel management. This kind of effort has a long track record
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
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