Change adoption
{{a|devil|}And observation which owns something to Peter Thiel’s excellent Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, we hypothesise that for any user to adopt new technology, it must immediately or, at any rate, quickly and within easy reach of that user’s imagination horizon — make that user’s life incontestably better.
It is the JC’s firm contention that we, and certainly our thought leaders, systematically discount the significance of innovation that has bedded into the market. This is the only possible explanation for the widespread conviction that the legal market has not innovated in the last 30 years.
Where a new bit of kit offers immediate benefits, legal eagles will be over it like a rash. Take the BlackBerry: The JC is old enough to remember when a couple of investment banking MDs in New York acquired these little alien things in mid 2002. Mobile email? Are you kidding me? Within nine months every bastard in the firm had one and no face-to-face meeting could last longer than seven minutes before losing every participant to the little screen. They were called “crackberries” for reason.
Likewise email, the internet and delta-view applications. Lawyers were all over these like a rash. No-one needed to take them on a change journey. They saw it, got it, and adopted it immediately.