As usual, Mark Cohen summed it up well in his article “Legal Innovation Makes Headlines; Change is Tough Yards”, reminding us that while innovation awards, announcements and events are flourishing, customer satisfaction remains low and “real change” has yet to happen in the legal industry.

As lawyers, whether in-house or in private practice, we're all subject to the “injunction to innovate”. While some of us embrace it more easily than others, most lawyers will start running the innovation race looking for shiny tools, such as automation or AI.

We love tech and fully acknowledge that it can provide us with fantastic instruments, but why should innovation necessarily start with tech? In other words, why do we start with the means, rather than the users?

And what is innovation in the first place? Having spent over a year studying innovation by design, what I know for sure is that there's no single definition of innovation. Progress? Invention? Discovery? Mere change? Etymologically, to innovate means putting something new inside, “from within”.

Following that lead, what could we put “inside” the legal industry to bring about progress? How about putting the user “inside”?