The Failure of Legal Innovation
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Okay, I admit: that was a pure linkbait headline. Not quite as bad as 17 Heartwarming Photos That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity, but still, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to draw in people who might be thinking (hoping?) that I’d given up on innovation in the legal market.
But the headline isn’t a complete fraud. In fact, you could consider this post as a necessary companion to An incomplete inventory of NewLaw, which generated a great deal of interest and enthusiasm last week. Scores of new law firms, businesses, and technologies are emerging in this dynamic market, generating justifiable excitement. Ron Friedmann led a discussion this week on Twitter that estimated the percentage of the corporate legal market that NewLaw is carving off — it may be quite small, but it still translates into a whole lot of money in a very short period of time.
Nonetheless, it’s precisely now, when legal innovation seems to be really taking off, that we need to remind ourselves how fragile and fraught the startup environment really is. A thousand flowers may well be planted in the legal marketplace; but hundreds will never bloom.
An excellent illustration of this idea can be found in a recent James Suroweicki column in The New Yorker. “Epic Fails of the Startup World” is a sober pail of cold water dumped onto the frenzied fires of innovation. “We live in the age of the startup,” Suroweicki writes, but this Cambrian explosion of innovative new businesses is occurring contemporaneously with a mass extinction: failed startups overwhelmingly outnumber successful ones.
Read original articleTags: James Suroweicki, Legal Market, Ron Friedmann
