Innovation and the legal sector: back to basics

Joe Fred­er­icks — Direc­tor and Per­son­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Con­sul­tant at PCA Law

If we are to believe the word on the street or at least the words in those glossy new brochures, the legal sec­tor is awash with inno­va­tion. Over­flow­ing with it. Accord­ing to those funky rebrand­ed web­sites, vir­tu­al­ly every lawyer in the world is engaged in their own dai­ly quest to be the legal sector’s answer to Steve Jobs. Sil­i­con Val­ley, eat your heart out.

REALLY? IS INNOVATION RIFE IN THE LEGAL SECTOR?

Lawyers and change. Law firms and cre­ativ­i­ty. The legal sec­tor and rev­o­lu­tion. Not con­cepts that have tra­di­tion­al­ly sat side by side.

While many of us in the sec­tor would agree there are a num­ber of new, excit­ing and poten­tial­ly dis­rup­tive ideas com­ing through, for exam­ple the rapid rise of tech­nol­o­gy and the grad­ual emer­gence of new firm struc­tures, we strug­gle to reimag­ine the sec­tor as a hot bed of inno­va­tors and change agents. For a start, every­body is just too busy to have any big ideas. Sec­ond­ly, big ideas are usu­al­ly non-bill­able. And third­ly, the word – inno­va­tion – is just plain scary.

Yes, our clients demand it. Yes, it gen­uine­ly helps us to stand out from the crowd. Our PR peo­ple can’t get enough of it. We’re con­stant­ly told it’s the future. Gen Y seem to be obsessed with it. It can trans­form our bot­tom line and, accord­ing to their web­sites, our com­peti­tors are bathing in it. So, it seems that unless we engage in it, we’re going to get left behind like a dinosaur. And we all know what hap­pened to them.

FOUR KEY INGREDIENTS OF INNOVATION IN A LAW FIRM

But what exact­ly does inno­va­tion look like in a law firm? And how can we gen­uine­ly come through on all those lofty promis­es we’ve made on our web­sites?

At PCA, we’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the most inno­v­a­tive organ­i­sa­tions inside and out­side of the legal sec­tor. We’ve been able to break inno­va­tion down into four key ingre­di­ents that we see day in, day out (see below graph­ic). When you look at the four com­po­nents in iso­la­tion, you realise that inno­va­tion is much less rad­i­cal than the word sug­gests and it’s actu­al­ly about get­ting back to basics.

Boston Con­sult­ing Group’s annu­al list of the world’s 50 most inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies con­sis­tent­ly fea­tures brand names that we would all imme­di­ate­ly asso­ciate with being ahead of the curve – Apple, Google, Tes­la, Microsoft and Sam­sung were the top five last year – but the list also con­tains organ­i­sa­tions that are doing some of the sim­ple things very well.

The first ingre­di­ent we’ve iden­ti­fied is some­thing we call organ­i­sa­tion­al con­fi­dence. This is to do with your own inter­nal struc­tures and process­es. It’s about remov­ing the fear of inno­va­tion by hav­ing the strength of a safe­ty net with­in your organ­i­sa­tion. It comes down to hav­ing the right peo­ple, in the right roles, per­form­ing at the right lev­el. Hav­ing con­fi­dence they all know exact­ly what their role is; that they col­lab­o­rate and com­mu­ni­cate bril­liant­ly as a team. It involves objec­tive set­ting, del­e­ga­tion, feed­back, project man­age­ment, cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment, finan­cial hygiene, IT sys­tems, excel­lent man­age­ment skills and some good old-fash­ioned tech­ni­cal exper­tise. With these inter­nal sys­tems and skillsets in place, you have the foun­da­tion required for try­ing new things. You have organ­i­sa­tion­al con­fi­dence.

This ingre­di­ent might feel like the most basic, how­ev­er with­out organ­i­sa­tion­al con­fi­dence there is no sol­id bedrock to evolve from.

Sec­ond­ly, you need some client cre­ativ­i­ty. For lawyers, this is per­haps the most reas­sur­ing ingre­di­ent on the list. Inter­est­ing­ly, to be inno­v­a­tive, you don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly need to come up with any new ideas at all. All you need to do is find out what your clients’ ideas are. Let them be the blue-sky thinkers. Ask them the right ques­tions; lis­ten for, what they call in ethno­graph­ic terms, some “thick data” – the stuff that uncov­ers your clients’ emo­tions, sto­ries and mod­els of the world – and then take their ideas back to the safe­ty of your organ­i­sa­tion­al­ly con­fi­dent offices.

You don’t even have to be the first peo­ple to try some­thing. Apple weren’t the first to try the iPod; they were the first peo­ple to call it that. Nobody remem­bers the first peo­ple to try it (Google it). How­ev­er, Apple were the first peo­ple to ask their mar­ket the right ques­tions. They let their cus­tomers describe their dreams, lis­tened prop­er­ly to the thick data and then applied this infor­ma­tion to their tech­no­log­i­cal mag­ic back at Apple HQ – in oth­er words they utilised their organ­i­sa­tion­al con­fi­dence.

Lawyers don’t need imag­i­na­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty. They have a ton of clients who have that in buck­et loads (just look at the way your clients’ review your bills). Lawyers just need to utilise their ques­tion­ing and lis­ten­ing skills to find out what their clients’ tomor­row looks like, today.

Inno­va­tion is about client ser­vice. It’s about prod­uct devel­op­ment. It’s about com­mer­cial growth. Ulti­mate­ly, it’s about the bot­tom line

Third­ly, and this is the brave bit, lawyers and law firms need to engage in some pro­duc­tive fail­ure. That’s right. Fail­ure. Not the first word that part­ners aspire to achieve.

Our friends in Sil­i­con Val­ley will tell you that in invest­ment cir­cles, if an entre­pre­neur hasn’t got a sol­id fail­ure under their belt, they’re not yet to be trust­ed. Fail­ure is worn as a badge of hon­our. Because, if you’re not will­ing to fail, how can you learn, grow and move on to the next lev­el? How can you imple­ment some­thing that’s new if you don’t know how to react when it doesn’t go to plan?

It’s all very well hav­ing an inno­va­tion com­mit­tee, but if there is a cul­ture of fear, if peo­ple are scold­ed for not get­ting things right, reward­ed for the same old, same old, and penalised for being brave and ahead of time, who in their right mind is going to be a cham­pi­on of change? There needs to be more sup­port, recog­ni­tion and real incen­tives for those who want to try some­thing dif­fer­ent in law firms.

Final­ly, and per­haps most crit­i­cal­ly, there needs to be com­mer­cial appli­ca­tion for some­thing to be tru­ly inno­v­a­tive. Hav­ing ideas and doing new things are not enough for inno­va­tion to suc­ceed in the free mar­ket. Inno­va­tion is about find­ing a solu­tion that answers people’s dreams or fears in a way that con­vinces them they need to pay for it.

This might sound obvi­ous. Because it is. But it can be har­nessed to help deci­sion-mak­ers in law firms realise inno­va­tion is not a nice-to-have, tick-box exer­cise. It’s not just a mar­ket­ing buzz­word because it looks pret­ty writ­ten in mod­ern fonts on your firm web­site. It’s a set of process­es and skills that every firm needs to devel­op. It’s about client ser­vice. It’s about prod­uct devel­op­ment. It’s about com­mer­cial growth. Ulti­mate­ly, it’s about the bot­tom line.

That’s the rea­son why every law firm writes about inno­va­tion in their mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als. That’s the rea­son why every client asks you about it towards the end of your pitch.

The chal­lenge is to make sure the real­i­ty of your answer lives up to the promise of your web­site. And for that, you don’t need to inno­vate – you need to go back to basics.

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it www.pcalaw.com