As Gary Kinder wrote in The Perfect Brief Part 11 - Polishing Your Brief, you should never use tricks to squeeze a brief into a word or page limit. It’s unethical and judges will notice—they’ve seen every trick we can imagine.

For most lawyers and law firms, their business strategy is three words long: “Do good work.” The assumption is that individual effort and intelligence are all that it takes to succeed. If it were ever true, it isn’t anymore. Today there’s a breakdown in trust and an uptick in blame that’s getting in the way of “good work.”

Innovation is now becoming an annoying buzzword. Even for people inclined to embrace legal innovation, the word is now eliciting groans. And for people afraid of change, innovation is such a loaded word that even thinking about it is overwhelming.

There’s only one certainty: The legal industry is continuing to change. Everything else is uncertain. The question is whether lawyers will adjust enough to remain a valuable and well-compensated part of it.

The legal industry is overrun with counterintuitive and counterproductive expectations about innovation. The demands for radical innovation seem to grow louder every day. The more frustrated we are with the lack of progress, the more extreme we are with our demands. But here’s a simple question: is the purpose of innovation to show our CEOs and clients that we are exploring the latest fashionable technology? Or is the purpose of innovation to increase revenue, value, and client satisfaction?

What does it take to thrive in today’s knowledge economy? If you read commentary from the legal industry, the answer is clear: innovation. This buzzword is alluring because it’s amorphous, ambiguous, ill-defined, and unmeasured. We can reward ourselves for “doing something,” while doing nothing at all.  If we can’t agree on a definition or direction, we can continue talking without taking any action.

It may feel good to encourage spontaneity and creativity, but random acts of innovation don’t work on a large scale. To be successful, innovation must be strategically executed and aligned to business strategies.  However, most companies fail to unite innovation and strategic initiatives.  PwC surveyed 1,200 executives about managing innovation and found that 54% struggled to connect innovation and business strategy.

When it comes to efforts to improve legal service delivery, we tend to look outward. We consider how we should re-engineer processes; how we can better staff projects; and what technology we should use. We rarely stop to think about how we should improve ourselves.

Lawyers are struggling to embrace change and this is impeding innovation. Even for those who want to change, most efforts fail to deliver.  How can we put in so much effort for so little gain?  Maybe it’s because we’re not identifying the right problems to solve.

Our approach to technology and process improvement initiatives is often fueled by hope, driven by shame, and made urgent by fearful hype.