Will Law Experience a Darwinian Extinction Event?

Or Can Lawyers Actually Learn to Change?

How many law firm lawyers does it take to change a lightbulb?

None. Lawyers don’t change.

I first heard that joke at a seminal legal operations conference in Chicago, and it captured nicely the frustration the legal operations professionals there (both lawyers and businesspeople) expressed throughout the conference.

The legal ops folks at that conference described in great detail how law departments were experiencing unprecedented pressure from boards and C-suites to remedy the many shortcomings in the existing practice model — out-of-control budgets, price/value disconnects, distorted risk allocations, and much more.

And law firms were…talking. They weren’t changing. They were just talking.

The joke made explicit what is implicit in so many discussions about lawyers and change: that lawyers can’t change. That they’re risk averse, change-resistant, techno-phobic and a host of other hyphenated things that make redesigning law practice impossible.

Or are they? Could we have mistaken what’s going on in law practice? Might something else — something really fundamental — be operating here? And might that something else offer up an opportunity — a path for real change?

Those questions and others are covered in this interview with the International Legal Technology Association’s Futurist. It took place during ILTA’s annual conference in DC, where the topic of lawyers and change was front and center.

Oh, and Futurist is me, by the way. Just to get that on the table.