Innovation: it's not all inspiration

Innovation wasn't a concept typically associated with lawyers until Reena Sengupta and the Financial Times risked ridicule and created the 'Innovative Lawyers' awards in the UK.

Now the awards go from strength to strength and have US and Asian versions and no doubt more in the pipeline.

I commented last month that law firms are the last businesses in the supply chain to be transformed. But being last is not such a bad thing. Law firms can learn quickly from other sectors and bring mainstream concepts newly to law to make business-changing progress quickly.

Many of the areas where law firms are innovating - and we are all doing it, or thinking or talking about doing it - have been around for years in other sectors: project management; lean process; procurement ; labour arbitrage using lower cost centres or roles; commoditising services into online products.

Partly the pressure has come from our clients; but in the UK it has also come from those new model legal services providers with experience from sectors other than law. As Reena recently told our partners: those who are horizontally networked (with people outside their own sector) are more innovative than those only vertically networked (with those from their own sector).

Which means that many of the best ideas aren't new, they just haven’t been tried here yet.

And in any event success doesn't just come from inspiration. Creativity is thinking up new things; innovation is doing new things, as Theodore Levitt said.

It’s the implementation, the execution, that will make the difference, not the novelty of the idea.

* Photo: Pantheon, Rome, June 2013