Beyond Boundaries

Collaboration has, admittedly, become something of a buzzword in the legal profession these days. But all signs suggest that it is far more than a passing fad. Throughout the legal world, as in most knowledge-based industries, two trends are crashing together. On the one hand, vast increases in knowledge are forcing professionals to specialise, whether by discipline, geography or problem class. On the other hand, vast increases in the complexity of today’s problems call for those specialists to collaborate across disciplinary and organisational boundaries to tackle those sophisticated issues. In short, the tension between these two trends is what produces the need for effective collaboration.