Debates about innovation in law can be a bit tribal. The Creative Destroyers decry the billable hour. They mock Big Law as a broken model and see law as a dusty rule book in need of big data and a scientific reinvention. Law is vastly complex and inefficient. More traditional folk point to the resilience of law, and law firms. They snigger, not always unfairly, at the self-serving evangelism of the new model insurgents. And they comfort themselves, unwisely I suspect, with any signs that the current crop of innovators are failing. The singularity may not be near, but that does not mean that it is far.
The extent to which these two tribes understand each other might be partly down to the narrow view of lawyers and legal education as well as practice’s (be it innovative or otherwise) narrow appreciation of what legal education and research is about. A step towards resolving that is being taken when the Centre for Ethics and Law hosts a debate on legal services innovation and education. In relation to that, I was struck by a passage from Gillian Hadfield’s excellent piece on the extent to which US regulation of lawyers inhibits innovation and is a drag on the US economy. She sets out her concerns about the way legal service providers are educated:
