By Paul Lippe
I attended an excellent meeting at Georgetown University Law Center last week, “Trends in the Delivery of Corporate Legal Services.”
The theme was “is change really happening?” We can point to conflicting signs: Some firms are thriving, some are failing, many clients are touting “alternative” fee structures, others are hesitant to move away from the status quo.
My takeaway from the conference was that change is accelerating, but by definition the folks who speak at conferences will reflect that view.
So I thought it would be helpful for those of us “scoring at home” to provide a basic scorecard to keep track on the evolution to a legal “New Normal” over the next 24 months.
First, a comment on change. As Pat Lamb suggested, change in law, as in most fields, is a distributed phenomenon—some people do something different, others replicate, sometimes it spreads, sometimes it doesn’t.
A simple model of law would suggest that 2 percent to 5 percent of folks are innovators, 60 percent are fast followers, and the rest are laggards. This model was borne out in the adoption of PCs, email and the Web among lawyers. It suggests two conflicting and hard-to-reconcile conclusions:
(a) The innovators will always be out there and won’t always be predictive of where others will go; and
(b) The laggards are always out there and are never predictive of where others will go.
But here’s the implication. Because there are relatively few innovators in law, and the followers tend to move as a herd, once we cross over 10 percent or so of adoption of anything new, that indicates the innovators have coalesced and the fastest followers are following, which means the die is cast. Once 60 percent have done something, it’s done. There’s nothing left to discuss. So the interesting part of change is tracking what happens between 2 percent and 10 percent adoption.
Here’s my “New Normal” scorecard:
As law departments self-assess, some will clearly understand themselves to be innovators, and others as laggards. The vast majority in the middle may want to start by scoring themselves against these criteria and comparing themselves to respected peers.
So is change happening? Let’s check back in six months.
Paul Lippe is the founder and CEO of the Legal OnRamp, a Silicon Valley-based initiative founded in cooperation with Cisco Systems to improve legal quality and efficiency through collaboration, automation and process re-engineering. Lippe formerly was an executive at the electronic design automation company Synopsys and later was CEO of Stanford SKOLAR, a medical digital library and e-learning company sponsored by Stanford Medical School.
Editor’s note: The New Normal is an ongoing discussion between Paul Lippe, the CEO of Legal OnRamp, and Patrick Lamb, founding member of Valorem Law Group. Paul and Pat spend a lot of time thinking, writing and speaking about the changes occurring in the delivery of legal services. We hope you will join their discussions.