We are constantly writing about the change that is occurring in the legal industry. We hear the drumbeat of “innovate,” but with so much writ of late and so little said, it is becoming difficult to not treat the word “innovate” with disdainful irony. Without cognition of the core problem, innovate becomes meaningless. We are in a scoping crisis.
I previously argued disruption of the legal industry stemmed from the addition of “expected price” to our definition of client-value: “deliver quality matters” became “deliver quality matters at the expected price,” and changed everything. It is understandable that our first reaction was to infer we were in a pricing crisis, and then set about building pricing groups and developing those skills to our current sophistication. But pricing alone is insufficient as scoping is inextricable to it—and lawyers don’t scope.
