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Five Key Learnings from a Law Company Innovation Head

July 22, 2024

 Pratik Patel

legal ops law firm consulting law department consulting law department law firm innovation

I’ve had the privilege of serving as Head of Innovation at Elevate since its inception in 2011. Leading this team continues to be a highlight of my career.

When people ask what we do as innovators at Elevate, we show them this graphic and say, ‘We help you shift your innovation pathway from the left to the right.’

Some of our biggest innovation achievements include:

The best part of the innovation journey is how much we learned along the way. We feel that learning is more important than achievements because it can help others do even bigger and better things in law.

Because they are so important, we want to share five crucial learnings:

1. Innovation needs to be a lot of small arrows fueling a big-arrow strategy

As part of Elevate’s devotion to continuous improvement, we’ve tried all sorts of models for innovation organisation design. One approach was placing the innovation team (and me) at the top of the food chain to ‘drive down’ product strategy and central operating models. Another was placing the team alongside (in parallel) other business heads to serve as a consulting-style partner to those businesses. Another involved embedding the team into the software group to try using technology as a ‘door in’. And we also tried embedding innovation ‘solution leads’ into each service and product line to make innovation a natural part of day-to-day combat. We ultimately learned that a hybrid top-down, bottom-up approach is the optimal strategy. At the top, the management team set ‘downward-directed, big-arrow’ goals based on where innovation can impact revenue and profits the most. From below, the teams closest to the challenges were responsible and accountable for defining their innovation ‘small arrows’ goals that would achieve the big-arrow strategy.

Why? Because leaving ‘how’ with those teams leverages their deep subject matter expertise, front-row access to the processes, and acute awareness of challenges (and thus the solutions). This makes them best positioned to have ownership of the outcomes.

2. Lawyers – not engineers – are the best experts and true ‘key masters’ for innovation wins

Many – most? – lawyers think that engineers can never fully solve legal process challenges, no matter how good they are. Engineers ‘just don’t understand law’. Guess what? Those lawyers are RIGHT (unless the engineer has a law degree). My Elevate colleagues and I consistently see a markedly higher success rate for innovation projects when the lead expert (the lawyer) leads and guides us to the most acute challenges needing solutions. Why? Because those lawyers have direct experience to leverage to accurately uncover the real challenges with the most impact on cycle times and cost savings – the holy grails that everybody is searching for.

This is no surprise – after all, lawyers were the ones who created the initial process that birthed the problems at hand! (Sorry, I couldn’t resist 😊).

3. Teams who have felt real f***ing pain have the strongest motive and best catalyst for innovation

By real pain, we mean losing a team or a customer. Pain that induces fear and a terrible sinking feeling. We’re not saying that innovation can only exist as a response to ‘fires’. Quite the opposite. A fire is a time for firefighting. If you recommend innovation while a five-alarm fire is ablaze, you should expect to be immediately walked out of the room. Instead, pick up a firehose and start spraying! But once the fire is under control and the smoke begins to clear, pain becomes a catalyst for driving innovation.

4. Innovation success must be sold hard up the food chain

Law departments often approach Elevate for innovative solutions around contracts insights. Many times, the call comes only when a law department faces a time crunch to review thousands of contracts but cannot do it manually within the timelines. Enter Elevate. Our expert-led, AI-powered solution has repeatedly saved customers hundreds of thousands of dollars and delivered insights at warp speed.  And the feedback is highly favourable, a la ‘We loved it, and it saved us lots of time and money’.

Our reply? Great – but you’re not seeing the big picture! When innovating, you must quantify, communicate, and sell innovation hard up the chain of command – even more so when the innovation WORKS.

Why? Because beyond how it helped you, the buyer, it helped even more somebody to whom you deliver and report! And likely even more to somebody to whom they report! Only when you publicise those follow-on effects will it get attention, garner further support, and secure ongoing funding.

5. Innovation is a muscle that atrophies if not exercised regularly

Some organisations conduct annual ‘innovation huddles,’ spending the rest of the year (or more) executing agreed-upon ideas. This keeps teams focused and on task, pursuing clear goals aligned with (and typically driven by) budget cycles. However, an annual cyclical model shouldn’t stop the teams from continuously exercising their innovation muscles through cadenced discussions and backlogging of innovation ideas. Otherwise, those muscles will atrophy, morale will suffer, and retention will ensue. Moreover, at Elevate, we have determined that teams following a monthly cadence of innovation-focused discussion and idea backlogging perform better overall in terms of both customer satisfaction and financial metrics.

A final point: innovation requires listening. That’s why my fellow Elevate innovators and I want to hear your thoughts, ideas, and experiences with innovation (including your feedback on this article). After all, we are all still…learning!

Successful innovation requires ongoing efforts and activity, a hybrid approach to strategy and execution, lawyers as leaders, a team close to the ‘pain’ of the problems, and communication of innovative ‘wins.’

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