Diffusion Theory

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In this week’s special New Year Kickoff Post (282), Legal Evolution is pleased to welcome guest contributor Jeff Carr, a recently retired Fortune 500 general counsel who has, over the years, served as informal mentor and coach to countless legal innovators.

Jeff’s influence is evidenced by the large number of LE posts that reference his ideas, experience, encouragement, and leadership skills.  See, e.g., Post 226 (discussing his business and finance module for IFLP); Post 210 (Jason Barnwell acknowledging Carr’s pioneering work in legal department management); Post 190 (discussing Carr’s diagnosis of law’s leadership gap and fundamental incentives problem); Post 112 (discussing Carr’s Leader-Manager-Operator framework); Post 078 (Carr discussing positive experience with IFLP intern); Post 056 (discussing Carr’s “hot-wash” practice and its influence in leadership course at IU Law); Post 052 (Jae Um’s discussing Carr’s “massive passive resistance,” or MPR, change management challenge);  Post 008 (citing Carr ACES model in context of diffusion theory).
Continue Reading Guest contributor Jeff Carr (281)

Pretty much everything was a counterintuitive curveball.

In April of 2006, more than 15 years ago, I wrote a memo to file that would go on to exert a disproportionately large impact on my thinking and career, albeit many of the lessons took years to come into focus and were far from what I expected.

The topic was Moneyball as applied to law firm associates—in essence, sketching out the data and methodology necessary to identify under and overvalued attributes of law firm associates, akin to the selection methods used by Oakland Athletics in the famous book by Michael Lewis.
Continue Reading Moneyball for law firm associates: a 15-year retrospective (257)

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)

Photo by Sagar via Unsplash / Like all complex ecosystems, the legal industry and its problems are interdependent and connected.

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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The graphic above reflects three different types of innovation “outcomes”:

  1. Initiation of an innovation adoption process that results in an organization making a decision to adopt an innovation. See Post 015
  2. 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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