Professor William D. Henderson, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, is one of the leading voices on innovation in the legal profession. He recently wrote on how innovation works in the practice of law at the cutting edge.
Henderson, drawing on what he calls the McKenna Lifecycle of a Practice Area, identifies two types of innovation practiced by lawyers: 1) building substantial knowledge on the law and technical details impacting an emerging technology or practice area; and 2) improvements on the delivery of legal services in that area. These different types of innovation can be mapped out across the emergence, growth, maturation, and ultimate saturation of a new practice area.
Knowing how and when to invest in innovation can be critical to a successful law practice. Henderson’s discussion of the different types of innovation in the practice of law is definitely worth your time. Additionally, Henderson highlights Faculty Director Gary Marchant as an example of someone highly skilled at practicing the first type of innovation.
He [wows] legal audiences with novel questions of law that judges, regulators, and practicing lawyers are grappling with as a result of massive advances in science and technology, from autonomous cars to drones to cloning to global warming to digital data that captures our every move and hence of great value in determining issues of guilt or civil liability. . . . Gary Marchant is an astonishing example of how to get the three circles of teaching, service and scholarship to overlap in near perfect unity.