Klau shared three important lessons he has learned during his time in Silicon Valley, and told conference goers that they could easily be applied to the legal industry. First, Klau emphasized the importance of using data to make decisions and argued that facts and figures were exponentially more important than gut feelings and informed opinions. [Good news for Picture It Settled] Klau, who worked on then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, mentioned how the campaign relied on data to determine what combination of website graphics and verbiage generated the largest amount of donations. Everyone had their own opinion as to what worked and what didn’t, but what mattered in the end, said Klau, was cold, hard fact. “You can take the smartest people in the room and they’ll always be wrong,” said Klau. “We have to look at the data to get us to the conclusion. Anything else is a guess.”

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And Klau’s third lesson was that incremental change is the enemy of true innovation. Klau encouraged all legal professionals to think big and refuse to settle for anything less. For this, a video of Sergey Brin showed how, as a grad student in the early ’90s, he nearly settled for incremental change—a business that would allow people to order pizza via fax machine. Luckily for Brin, his fax left him and his fellow students hungry, and he turned his interest to other things that led to his co-founding of Google. “When you commit to only 10 percent improvement, then the profession never changes,” said Klau. In that vein, Klau argued that small firms are actually in a better position to take substantial risks compared to big firms, because big firms have too much money and resources at stake.

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Tags: Klau, Legal Innovators Klau, presidential campaign, Sergey Brin