It’s fashionable nowadays to talk about reinventing and disrupting the legal profession. We celebrate “legal rebels ” — The American Bar Association’s list contains many admirable choices. Daniel Katz and Renee Knake, faculty at the Michigan State University’s law school, have done the global community a great service with their ReinventLaw events. But I’ve long felt cognitive dissonance around the reinvent meme.

If something has already been invented, what’s the point of reinventing it? If things need to change, shouldn’t we focus our energies on inventing something new? We should re-engineer, re-design, re-envision, etc. But why re-do what has already been done? (I know that’s not the intention of the reinventers, yet the negative sense is implicit in the word.) Law’s already been invented. Let’s improve it, not reinvent it.

One of my early musings in this area was an article called ‘Reinventing Reinvention’ (The Capstone Letter, Jan./Feb. 1991). Addressing a pioneering community of document assembly application developers, it asked “How can we help each other? What can we learn from each other? What wheels can we avoid reinventing?” I argued that “We as a small programming community need to better recognize the commonalities we have with the software engineering world generally. We should not approach questions of development methodology, testing, and maintenance as though there had not already been 40 years of international experience in such matters.”

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