It’s a long story I don’t often tell my colleagues in the legal field, partially because it is long and attention spans are short, and partially because they’ll just find it confusing. But before I went to law school (at age 35), I was a firefighter/paramedic for nine years. See Post 070 (full story for
Diffusion Theory
Scoring your innovation (098)
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.…
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Inspire.Legal Case Study: Building a New Frame of Reference for the Ecosystem Era (084)

Disillusionment abounds and frustrations run high in the legal industry: nearly all signals scream at us to innovate faster. Inspire.Legal flipped the script by asking us to stop, collaborate and listen.
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Student Capstone Presentations: Visitors Welcome (038)
On Wednesday, November 29 from 6 to 8 pm at Northwestern Law, student teams in my “How Innovation Diffuses in the Legal Industry” give their capstone presentations. Topics include Everett Rogers’ rate of adoption model (see Post 008), the role of change agents (see Post 020), and crossing the chasm (see…
“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…
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…
Innovation in Organizations, Part III (017)
The graphic above reflects three different types of innovation “outcomes”:
- Initiation of an innovation adoption process that results in an organization making a decision to adopt an innovation. See Post 015
- Implementation of the adoption decision, which entails planning, change management, and redefining/restructuring and clarifying the innovation in the field so that it delivers its
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Innovation in Organizations, Part II (016)
The graphic above, adapted from Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (5th ed. 2013), shows the distribution of innovativeness among 324 German banks. The innovativeness scale is a count of innovation adoptions from a universe of 12 interactive telecom innovations that were diffusing through the German banking sector during the early 1990s. To help distinguish the early…
Innovation in Organizations, Part I (015)
Every legal innovator, early adopter and change agent shares a common, unifying desire: To speed up the pace of innovation within their organization.
This statement is true whether the context is a law firm, legal department, government agency, bar association, or law school. Over the years, I have commiserated with them all. Although they…
Fast versus Slow Innovations (011)
Are rapidly adopted innovations more valuable and important than innovations that take a long time to take hold? Not necessarily.
Post 011 is part of LE’s foundational series on diffusion theory. Here’s the key point: Speed of adoption is not a reliable guide for an innovation’s importance. In fact, competitive advantage is much more likely to lie among slower ideas where innovators focus on several key factors to accelerate the rate of adoption.
It is difficult to accept an insight this counterintuitive. Thus, we need an illustration.…
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