What is Innovation?

Welcome to week two, where we’re gonna look at innovation, its use in the legal profession, an example of a successful legal innovator and discuss the importance of ethics in a changing legal world. The first is the learning outcomes. By the end of this, we’d like to describe the prices of innovation, to explore the effects of disruption on the traditional model of legal services. And to discuss how important ethics are in a changing legal industry. But first, we wanna ask ourselves, what is innovation? And there are literally hundreds of different ways to define that. But the best is the most simple, the introduction of something new. Innovation tends to come from a creative process.

Sitting, looking at something, thinking there must be a better way to do this, trying different things probably failing, probably getting frustrated before finally the idea comes. And when it does, it always seems like the most obvious solution. Clearly though innovating is nothing new. Humans have been innovating since the dawn of time. And practically everything around us is the result of innovation. You can group different types of innovation into three primary categories. And they’re incremental, radical and disruptive. And as you may tell from the examples, there are some crossovers and equally arguments about what radical and disruptive really mean. But most innovation is made up of incremental innovation when something changes little by little.

And the best examples of these are major brands like CocaCola that tap into emerging trends and bring out improved products to reflect a changing demand. Always looking to improve in making more efficient pays off and it keeps the big companies at the full front. Radical innovation is using something completely new to solve a problem. And Netflix is a great example of this. They originally offered a web based DVD rental store where you ordered a film be delivered the next day. Once you finished it, you posted it back and it transformed the industry. It’s one of the big reasons that we no longer see a blockbusters on every street corner.

Disruptive innovation is all about using a tool or a technology to massively affect the way that an industry operates. As we saw in week one, a great example of this is the Internet and how it’s basically been a game changer for the way that society interacts with businesses. Whichever type of these innovation categories it falls into, the approach is broadly the same. Involves a knowledge of or looking at a process and working out how it can be improved using the best tools or technology available. And process analysis can often start with a series of individual posting notes on a whiteboard, setting out each step of the process.

And once it’s stripped back, you can step back and look at how to improve it. To put this into context, let’s take a common job for junior lawyers or paralegals document analysis. Not many years ago, in order to find the important parts of documents, you’d have to spend hours searching through legal block files. And the process is simple, the folders arrive, usually in a van. And then the junior lawyers are paid to sit and read through the documents searching for key phrases or important facts that they can put in an evidence bundle. But it’s pretty clear this whole process is inefficient, is costly, it’s time consuming.

The juniors are engaged in a process it’s not the speciality and could be better employed elsewhere in the business. So step forward, artificial intelligence. Documents can be scanned in sent electronically reducing delivery issues. AI can not read the documents, but it can rank them in terms of importance, find key phrases and highlight them and report. Also the fraction of the cost and time that it would take to pay a person today. And this is an excellent example which leads us neatly on to the next section, innovation in law.