Legal Evolution PBC

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Legal Evolution

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Lucy Bassli

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IFLP is proud to collaborate with the above list of innovators and early adopters. Later this month, the Institute for the Future of Law Practice (IFLP, or “I-flip”) will celebrate its one year anniversary. Before that, it was just an idea in the minds of a few dozen lawyers, legal educators and allied professionals.  In the fall of 2017, this “Group of 40” participated in a needs analysis. There were two questions: Is an intermediary…
Are we using innovation in legal ed to drive our existing mission, or disrupt it? There’s a place for both strategies. My own contributions to legal innovation have mostly been through my work as dean – over the course of thirteen years, at two law schools.  The experience gained through these two leadership endeavors has given me a reasonably optimistic take on the matter of innovation possibilities in the space of modern legal education.  Bill…
Sometimes, to protect and promote the long-term interest of stakeholders, leaders have to take difficult public positions. The decision won’t be popular or clearly right at the time, yet the risks of deflecting or avoiding a firm stance are just too high, at least for the collective.  For legal education, one of the best examples of this type of leadership occurred in 2014 when Dan Rodriguez was serving as President of the Association of American …
How should legal teams get started with data?  Here’s a prescription, along with a #RealTalk diagnostic. In Post 066, I shared that law firm and law department leaders often ask me how to get started with data analytics. I also shared that I usually respond by asking about their most important strategic objectives. For today’s post, I will play doctor and take a cut at a framework to serve as a prescriptive roadmap. The…
For this week’s post, I’m pleased to introduce guest contributor Evan Parker, Managing Director of LawyerMetrix. In Post 074, Evan tackles the profoundly important topic of diversity in the legal profession. After presenting compelling evidence that (1) clients want more diversity, (2) diverse legal teams produce better results, and (3) diverse firms make higher profits — what’s not to like? — Evan argues that clients are hindered by a lack of clear,…
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Innovation hype is alienating too many practicing lawyers. This is because we forgot that lawyers innovate in the realm of substantive law.  It’s time to fix that. Last year I was at a conference on law firm innovation organized by the Ark Group. To close things out, the event’s chairperson, Patrick McKenna, walked attendees through an insightful 30-minute flipchart session that could have been the centerpiece of the entire conference. Above is a depiction…
Working class solutions work fine for me. To celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary, my spouse (Mary Henderson) and I did something we had never done before: we booked a long overseas leisure trip.  We got married in 1993 when I was a firefighter-paramedic for a suburban Cleveland fire department and Mary was a writer for an advertising/public relations firm. I was 30. Mary was 31. Because I changed my career path five years…