And then they build monuments to you

In all this chaos, stop and remember: The legal profession has made extraordinary gains in just a few short years. Change for the better in law is here, and it's real. You can take us even farther.

Back in the late 2000s, I spent a number of years as Chair of the InnovAction Awards, an annual effort sponsored by the College of Law Practice Management to inspire law firms to embrace innovation in their businesses. We would spread word of the Awards far and wide, encourage firms to apply, invite the winners to our annual meeting, and shower them with praise and free publicity. (The Awards, still going strong, have recently adopted a new focus on promoting access to justice.)

You might think it was easy to get law firms to brag about their exciting new initiatives and earn an award in the process — that is, if you’d never spent time around lawyers. In the event, there were years when I felt like I was pulling teeth trying to find and highlight any law firm innovations. There were few to be found, and fewer still whose architects seemed interested in drawing attention to themselves.

The deep-rooted cultural resistance to innovation within the legal profession frustrated me no end. I spoke and wrote extensively (and probably tiresomely) about it throughout the 2010s, to little effect. Lawyers, I came to believe, resisted innovation partly from complacency, but also partly from fear: They didn’t really understand why their firms were so profitable, and so they shied away from trying anything different, in case they might inadvertently break their magic money machines.

My old InnovAction experience came to mind earlier this month while reading “From Laggards to Tech Founders: Law Firm Innovation Is Flourishing” at LegalTech News:

For years, those in law firms have heard a common refrain: innovate or fall behind. Only recently, however, does it seem that firms have taken this message to heart.

With the rise of Generative AI, and its predicted disruption across the entire legal services market, many firms are accelerating their technology development, adoption and training efforts, worried that if they don’t keep up with the pace of change, they’ll face an existential crisis.

But it's not just advanced technology that is pushing firms to embrace innovation. After going through a pandemic that required bold, rapid pivots in the way they operate, and steadily building out their technology efforts over years, many now find themselves able to run, instead of just walk, when it comes to legal innovation.

I’ll admit, I felt a little verklempt reading these lines. A touch of vindication, no matter how late in coming, is always welcome. But it was the lengthy list of innovative initiatives that followed, undertaken by some of the most esteemed (and previously hidebound) law firms in the US and UK, that made me fully appreciate just how much the law firm landscape has changed in the last few years. And it leads me to offer a few quick points for you here.

First, this sea change didn’t come about because the legal profession became a frisky hotbed of experimentation overnight. It came about because external forces far beyond lawyers’ control took hold of the legal sector and shook it like a snow globe. In March 2020, COVID-19 hit North America; in March 2024, ChatGPT-4 celebrated its first birthday. I think we’ll look back someday and see that the world changed more in those four years than it had in the previous 40.

Left to its own devices for all those years, the legal profession burrowed down into a comfortable nest and build itself a little fortress out of spindly sticks like the bar exam, the billable hour, and the Unauthorized Practice of Law. And that kept lawyers very happy and secure, right up until the floodwaters came. Those little sticks are now going to be swept far away, and I don’t see any fortresses in our profession’s future.

Second, this sea change is going to accelerate, not only because of external crises, but because the rising generation of lawyers will demand it. This report from LexisNexis UK, revealing lawyers’ dissatisfaction with their own firms’ productivity and pace of change, should open eyes within law firms everywhere: Two-thirds said their firms are barely adequate, slow or very slow to respond to change, 20% in large firms said they’ll leave if their firms don’t invest in AI, and more.

These results mirror my first-hand experience at the law firms I’ve worked with in the last couple of years. Many members of the under-45 generation are tired of law firms’ old ways and frustrated by leadership’s insistence on maintaining them. Many are simply shaking the dust from their sandals as they leave; but others are moving up the law firm ladder and replacing the rungs as they climb.

Even with an accelerated pace of change, of course, law firms have a very long distance to cover. Like Richard Tromans, I don’t expect deeply entrenched patterns in the legal world to be overturned in a couple of years. But we’re going to close that distance surprisingly fast, because the new lawyers coming into this profession are just not going to put up with all the old nonsense.

Which brings me to my third, and most important, point: All these developments should fill us with genuine, energizing hope. I know that sounds kind of crazy right now — look out any window and you can see a world on fire — but it’s true. We are experiencing, even in the midst of a polycrisis, daily ongoing proof that the legal profession can change and the legal sector can be remade.

Twenty-five years ago, lawyers were denouncing the dangers of multi-disciplinary partnerships (MDPs) and the blasphemy of sharing fees with non-lawyers. Fifteen years ago, lawyers called Alternative Business Structures (ABSs) an abomination imported from Britain that would destroy North American legal ethics. Today, an MDP resulting from the merger of two ABSs gets announced in Arizona, and nobody bats an eyelash. “First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”

Lawyers and clients are using artificial intelligence on a daily basis. Bar authorities are creating new licensure pathways and fleets of paraprofessionals to serve more legal needs. Law firms are now considered draconian if they make lawyers come into the office four days a week. If I’d predicted even half of the foregoing, I’d have been laughed off the interwebs. Yet here we are.

Yeah, a lot of things are incredibly bad out there, and they’re probably going to get worse. But some things are incredibly good out here too, with the promise of getting still better. We need to recognize our advances and celebrate our victories, and to realize that when we push hard for positive change, sooner or later, we are going to achieve it.

But we need to push hard. We need to keep pounding away at that brick wall until it finally crumbles and the daylight pours in. I have no idea in which direction the arc of history will bend, but I do know it’s not going to bend by itself. We need to roll up our sleeves, climb up onto the barricades, and keep bending that arc of history until it’s pointing towards the light. It’s a massive job, it’s a challenging and even dangerous job, and we’re the ones who have to do it. No, that’s not right — we’re the ones who get to do it.

Hope is a choice. Choose a better future for the legal sector and everyone who needs what it provides. We’ve done it before; I guarantee we can do it again.