Legal Disruption- Legal Innovation? What is it? What isn't it?

“The family law system is broken… we can rebuild it!” “Time to disrupt the legal industry!” 

Seems that since Uber hit the market, the agenda became to ‘uberize” everything. Throw in few techy terms like AI, machine deep learning and quantum processing and the future is either utopian …or dystopian, depending on who you are speaking with. Technology is a saviour… technology is the boogie-man, again dependent on who is telling the story.

The buzzword I hear everywhere is, “disruption”! And you know what… if it’s broken, clunky or expensive…well then just go ahead and fix it and if that means disruption, so be it! But, though some innovations are disruptive, its important to recognize that disruption isn’t the same as innovation. In fact, disruption as a primary goal is strategically, if not functionally very different from innovation as a goal. Heck while we are at it… let’s make sure that we note, that innovation (and yes even disruption) does not necessarily assume technology.

If anything, I have understood from our work to date that not all circumstances require disruption in order to bring about new innovative value to our clients or in order to influence industry behaviours. By definition, disruption is, at core, a protest. Disruption is to compete directly with the incumbent ways of thinking and doing things in order to be successful in our goals. More to the point, disruption of the “big boys” is typically really about huge resources, huge money, huge launching points, huge risk and inherently huge battles.

On the other hand, innovation is often a form of reformation… powerful, positive, and in most cases essential insights that bring about creative solutions within an existing eco-system. Without a doubt technology will bring greater and greater innovation, but regardless of technology there are profound innovations that can be implemented today, even by the most tech-deficient members of any team. Innovation happens when we revisit our business models, our process designs, our behavioural economics, our empirical methodologies and our intrinsic heuristics etc.

Personally, I maintain that radical innovation is found through what we in our office call “radical collaboration.” Bringing “outsiders” to a table of “insiders” and encouraging the insiders to put down their bravado & daggers long enough to listen to what another’s field of expertise could bring to your field of expertise. What can the insurance industry learn from the health industry? What can the chartered accountant teach the lawyer? What does the UX/UI designer know that the social worker could implement?

Let’s be blunt… more and more, disruption IS becoming the norm. There are always going to be those entities that when the timing is perfect, have the power, positions, money or strategic insights to flip everything over onto their back. But disruption, by definition, will never be the norm corporate culture for everyone… innovation can be. 

Creating a culture of innovation is to create a corporate worldview that embraces problem solving, radical reorganization and creative solution generation. Will such cultures be strategic? Likely. Will those cultures prove to be disruptive? Quite possibly. Will those cultures be innovative…. Most definitely.