How do Law Firms Become “Innovative”?
Recently, I’ve had some conversation about the idea of whether a particular law firm is innovative or not. It’s a tough question to answer, in my mind, because it really depends on how you define innovative. Just having innovative technology in place does not make a firm innovative, yet at the same time, even the most creative people can’t be innovative without the proper tools. To me, it involves having technology, culture, and the people willing to be innovative for a firm to be considered innovative. So how do you determine whether you have the culture and people to make the investment in tools worthwhile? Is it enough to have conversations with various areas about how they work, or how they’d like to work? What kinds of questions would you ask of attorneys, paralegals and other staff to figure out how they would like to innovate, when they may not know much about the tools available to them? How do you get people talking about innovation, or how they use technology in an open, hone
