Why are lawyers afraid of opportunity?

Why are lawyers afraid of opportunity? is a most welcome contribution to Dialogue by Dr. Floortje Blindenbach-Driessen.

When chatting with my lawyer friends, the only thing I hear is that all is sweet and well. “We have been practicing law this way for 100 years.” “Our clients hire us to address their mission-critical and complex problems, which require our in-depth expertise.” “Innovating is not something we do, lawyers are by nature risk averse and conservative.” Meanwhile, they are moving to smaller offices, further out of town, reducing their staff, and purchasing smaller lease cars. While that is just anecdotal and symptomatic evidence of tough times, there are several books that provide in-depth detail of the struggles of law firms, such as Remaking Law Firms: Why & How (American Bar Association 2016).  What I’m fascinated with is why lawyers struggle to acknowledge there is the opportunity and need for change?

Afraid of success?

In the current era of the fourth industrial revolution, there is so much opportunity to enhance the law service experience. For example, computers are much better and more consistent at searching for information and can work overnight.  This gives you, as a lawyer, the opportunity to focus on those matters that truly require ingenuity. Alternatively, you can service more clients, because a lot of the work can be done in half the time. Clients certainly welcome these higher value services, since they get more and higher quality work, at lower costs.

Of course, there is a caveat; taking advantage of the technology and other opportunities available requires you to do things differently. It requires changing your business model and key performance indicators, to give such a new service the chance to establish itself and prove its worth. However, why not set clear objectives and give these new opportunities a try?

Afraid of failure?

Perhaps few law firms give the available opportunities a try because they are too afraid to fail. Indeed, on average it takes 1,000 ideas to generate one successful commercial new product. This does not mean that as a law firm you get the opportunity to say “no” to 999 ideas and then place your bet on that one brilliant idea. That is unfortunately not how innovation works. It means that you must set out your course, define your strategic objectives, and then figure out how to make it happen. Which means doing a lot of background research about the problem and existing solutions, as well as interviewing many people that encounter the issue, including clients. Through this process of customer discovery, you can ensure you are developing a novel service solution that your clients truly want and need. In this process, you most likely learn that your initial gut feeling was off and that you need to adjust and fine tune your solution. Is that failure? No, that is part of the innovation process. As Thomas Edison said

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 1,000 ways how not to create a light bulb.”

Afraid to start?

Could it be that starting is the problem? Do most lawyers even know where and how to start developing a new service? After all, how to innovate or develop a new service is not taught in law schools. Without precedent, stepping into unchartered territory is something lawyers tend to avoid instead of embrace. However, even if one knew how to innovate, it still could be scary to start. The first step implies a commitment and sets expectations to deliver.

Where to start?

Often clients ask me, why can we not just copy the processes of an innovative firm like Google? To be honest, that is a very bad idea. Their innovative processes, no matter how successful, are not relevant for law firms. No law firm can afford to spend $100 million per year on innovation or has billions of customers to offset the cost of innovation failures such as Google Glass and many others.

Quite the contrary, to be a successful innovator in the professional services requires a very effective and efficient execution of the innovation efforts. Without diligence and discipline, it is very difficult to generate a positive overall return of investment. Among others, because of the relatively small scale, any new service can be applied and the labor intensity of the process. After all, law entails professional services, not products.

The good news is that there are proven innovation processes for professional service firms that yield successful outcomes and software to support these processes, such as our O4I Workbooks. O4I Workbooks enable professionals service firms such as law firms to create, optimize and manage a pipeline of new service initiatives. The educational component helps guide lawyers through the innovation process step-by-step, while the analytics that result from this process enable management to easily identify the best teams and opportunities with the highest likelihood of success.

A use case example in healthcare – an industry that has equal troubles in renewing their service models – is provided below, to give a more concrete example of what a structured approach to new service development actually entails:

Innovations in Telemedicine Course

In July 2016, 14 participants started a six-week online Innovations in Telemedicine summer course at the George Washington University, facilitated by an online education and support platform.

The participants were all busy professionals; four were practicing clinicians.

Teams are the key to success when bringing ideas to practice. Forming and working in such multidisciplinary innovation teams is often troublesome and time-consuming. It is stressful to select suitable teammates, challenging to find common ground, and difficult to make all pull their weight in a process already fraught with uncertainty. The platform therefore also facilitated team formation. These teams would later be qualified by several participants as the “best team I ever worked in.”

The online education platform guided the teams through the ideation process. Exercises kept them focused on the task at hand and weekly progress reports kept the teams on track. These reports also enabled the teams to identify and strengthen weak areas.

By the end of six weeks, four testable concepts were presented, with each concept substantiated by data. The proposals produced in the process, described the opportunity and outline next steps.

Two of the four teams concluded based on the data gathered and the insights learned, that further pursuing their concept would not be worth the time and effort.

The analytics provided insights in team learning, a factor that helps to predict the likelihood of success for the continuing teams. 

Perhaps most importantly, by streamlining the ideation process the participants saved time, while aligned tasks and motivated team members helped them to be successful in exploring their innovation endeavors.

Dialogue

So, why do lawyers struggle to take advantage of the current era full of opportunities? Why do they prefer to pretend the status quo is just fine, even if it clearly is not? What is needed to enable them to become innovators and take advantage of all of the many opportunities that are out there?

Author

Dr. Blindenbach-Driessen is passionate about innovation management and new service development in the professional services, which led her to start Organizing for Innovation LLC (www.organizing4innovation.com). She teaches courses related to innovation management and strategy implementation for executive education programs around the globe. Her research focuses on the innovation challenges and opportunities of professional service organizations. Her work has appeared in academic journals such as Research Policy, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and the Journal of Product Innovation Management.

Dr. Blindenbach-Driessen championed many innovation projects while working for the Fluor Corporation and for Children’s National Medical Center. She coached professionals in their innovation endeavors in engineering firms (Tauw and Tebodin), system integrators (Fluor, CGI), consultancies (Deloitte, PWC, and IG&H), law firms (Baker&McKenzie, Loyens and Loeff, Conway), research centers (Barco and NXP), health care (Children’s National Medical Center, Mediq), and entrepreneurship programs (NSF I-Corps, DC I-corps and Accelerate DC).