legal sanity

I’ve been happily immersed in a flurry of articles on user innovation. My regular visits to Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge lead me to a great Q & A piece titled How Kayak Users Built a New Industry. In it, Harvard professor Carliss Baldwin discusses her recent study of the rodeo kayak industry that showed how user innovations become commercial products (pdf). According to Baldwin, many product innovations originate with a user who “opens up a new ‘design space’” by doing something different with a product that’s “exciting to other users.” This initial change compels those other users to “look for ways to improve on the original innovation.” In this way, the design space grows to include a community of co-innovators in which “improvements to the basic innovation are freely shared, tested, and pushed forward.”

The business wisdom of embracing and encouraging the citizen-innovator is conveyed in a Wired Magazine article called Geeks in Toyland [tipped by The Power of Influence blog]. The piece chronicles a decision by the Lego Group to enlist the aid of its user community in upgrading the popular Mindstorms robot kit. The main user-innovators worked in secrecy on the project for 11 months, compensated only by their love of the product and “a few Lego crane sets and Mindstorms NXT prototypes.” Notably, the article winds down with a reference to MIT professor Eric von Hippel, a scholar who worked with Carliss Baldwin on the rodeo kayak study and wrote the book Democratizing Innovation.

After consuming this information, I asked myself who are law firm users? Clients, to be sure. But, lawyers are users, too. In fact, in many ways, they’re the first-line consumers of the firm’s brand and business cultures. This is a belief I’ve expressed before in posts on law firm evangelism. And it begets a related query: what would law firms look like if they considered their lawyers a potential community of user-innovators and actively nurtured that potential? What positive shifts in the firm’s environment, service model, and employee commitment and morale would result? Stated differently: to what extent do law firms damage themselves by ignoring or supressing their resident lawyer-mods?

It seems that, even without their firms’ nod, many lawyers are embracing the role of the citizen-innovator and are coming together in communities – such as the blogosphere - in which they openly share their inspiring ideas on legal service innovation. Eventually, some of these innovators will leave their firms to market their ideas as solutions to the legal profession’s long-standing problems. They might even become industry leaders in the not-too-distant future. One such innovator to watch is Exemplar Law Partners, LLC, which offers us a glimpse of its cutting-edge work at the blog, inside the firm of the future.