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Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.

Nothing I have read over the last several years haunts me as much as the following line from Gillian Hadfield: “People who feel as though the rules don’t care about them don’t care about the rules.”  Rules for a Flat World at 79 (2017).

When I first read those words, I can remember thinking, “this explains the 2016 presidential election,” though the name Donald Trump appears nowhere in the book. Likewise, for the next four years, Professor Hadfield’s observation offered a remarkably concise explanation for the public’s growing indifference to democratic norms, democratic institutions, and the Rule of Law. Then the events of January 6th offered a disturbing punctuation point.
Continue Reading Just not good enough (226)

Photo by BP Miller via Unsplash / Clear-sighted & pragmatic teams will win the day.
Talk of disruption dominated the last decade.  In 2021, widespread change in legal markets appears elusive.  Will this time be different?

Today’s post (219) is Part IV of #GreatExpectations for the #GreatReset, a 5-part series on…

Photo by Jeremy AAsum on Unsplash

If blazing a new path is your only option, it’s also your best option. Make the most of it.

[Editor’s note:  If readers pick up a copy of Richard Susskind’s Tomorrow’s Lawyers (2nd ed. 2017) and flip to page 135, they’ll see a table captioned “New jobs for lawyers.” This table is reproduced below.  Richard writes, “these are the jobs that flow quite clearly from the arguments and claims of this book.” 
Continue Reading One student’s career journey into legal tech (196)

Arnedia Wallace, SULC

[Editor’s note: The IFLP archives include several student profiles that document the impact of the program on students’ lives.  With the students’ permission, the IFLP leadership team wanted to share these with a broader audience. Regarding Arnedia Wallace, after three weeks at the IFLP Bootcamp at Colorado Law in the spring of 2019, she went …

Amish barn-raising in Wayne County, Ohio.  Click on to enlarge.  Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash

An essay for lawyers over the age of 55, plus anyone who knows one.

In his viral essay, “It’s Time to Build,” tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen argues that the colossal institutional failures…

Lessons from the dot com implosion and the financial meltdown.

Henry Kissinger once observed that while history does not repeat itself it often offers useful lessons regarding the future.  With this in mind, I thought might be useful to see what lessons the last two periods of economic adversity – the dot com implosion and…

A story for the New Year.  Maybe you can relate.

I recently turned 57 years old.  Although I am dismayed and disappointed by many things happening in our republic, and impatient with an industry, profession and educational complex that is supposed to operate in the public interest, whatever quantum of cynicism I possessed went away in 2019. Moreover, it happened quickly, albeit many of the pieces were put into place more a decade ago.
Continue Reading Losing my cynicism (131)

A worksheet to help innovators avoid failure

The graphic above is worksheet designed to aid the development and adoption of legal innovations. I created it for my “How Innovation Diffuses in the Legal Industry” courses at Bucerius and Northwestern Law (downloadable PDF available here). This past week, I had the opportunity to present it at LMA’s P3 Conference in Chicago.
Continue Reading Scoring your innovation (098)

IFLP is proud to collaborate with the above list of innovators and early adopters.

Later this month, the Institute for the Future of Law Practice (IFLP, or “I-flip”) will celebrate its one year anniversary. Before that, it was just an idea in the minds of a few dozen lawyers, legal educators and allied professionals.  In…