In the wilds of Chicago, this year’s ABA Tech Show is in full bloom, with over 100 vendors in an exhibit hall imploring “thought leaders” to come try their wares with the offer of winning a shiny gadget.  It’s one of the grand opportunities for the futurist choir and those who pray at the alter of technology to sing a rousing version of Kumbaya and remember why they are the future of the law.

While you couldn’t get me there with the promise of a Chicago hotdog atop a brand new iPad, Sam Glover from  The Puddle is my eyes and ears, my boots on the ground.  It’s not that Sam necessarily sees things as I do, as he’s a computer nerd whereas I’m your basic Luddite, but he’s my barometer for the cutting edge when small words are necessary. And this year, Sam’s reports back couldn’t be more informative.

Putting aside the “new and improved” claims of vendors who have changed their links from blue to red and their text from Ariel to Garamond, none of which interests anyone who actually practices law, Sam focused on what used to be called Ignite Law, but has now been changed to  LexThink.1 (because name-changing is almost as cool as substance), the cutting edge segments of futurists deepest thoughts. It’s run by Matt Homann, and promises “one big idea” every six minutes.



Sam sat through the whole hour and returned the favor by reducing the program to  ne-sentence-ideas-from-lexthink-1-abatechshow/” target=””>8 one-sentence ideas.  Why only 8 when it’s supposed to be ten? One lost her voice and Sam is math challenged. Don’t judge him.

The idea is to be entertaining and clever, not comprehensive.

Actually, LexThink.1 may be entertaining for the audience, but since most of the presenters are seasoned speakers, it’s more like a dance battle. If doing polished, six-minute presentations were in any way like dancing.

I think I am doing justice to the format in reducing each six-minute presentation to its one-sentence point — if it has one — plus my commentary.

If anything, Sam makes more sense of the hoe-down than it may deserve, so I’ll take a stab at reductio ad absurdum and sum it up on a mere single sentence: We’re running out of buzz words, but dancing as fast as we can.

Sam goes on to  discuss at greater length the theme of LexThink.1, disruption.

So all the speakers talked about what will disrupt law practice, whether it’s virtual offices or LegalZoom or gamification or Big Data.

Here’s the thing: disruptive innovation is not coming to the law. At least, not quickly.

By example, he notes how legal research has moved from dead trees to online, but then reminds that it’s still the same duopoly, West and Lexis, doing the same thing but in a different format.

They just changed the delivery method. They didn’t really even change the pricing model. That’s not disruptive; it’s an evolving business model.

But what of the “big” ideas that are “game changers”?

LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer are not disruptive innovation, either. They are basically just selling forms and pre-paid legal services, which have been around forever, in one form or another. People who think this is disrupting the legal industry do not have a very good grasp of the legal industry. Customers of LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer were never your potential clients. They may have been Office Max’s, or Hyatt Legal‘s, but they were never yours.

For another, LegalZoom has been around since 2001 without disrupting anything, as far as I can tell. It’s telling that people are still talking about when LegalZoom will finally start disrupting everything. It won’t.

This is one of the many problems with proclaiming a bright and shiny future ahead of us. Eventually, time passes and we get to test whether it happened.  It didn’t. It won’t. Things will evolve because of technology and the occasional idea that survives the rigors of scrutiny by the risk averse, but this is nothing new and hardly disruptive.  Telephones were invented and became the prevalent means of communication. Electricity was a biggie too.  But legal forms? Meh.

Missing from Sam’s recap is one aspect of the law that has been disruptive, the downward spiral of lawyer marketing, giving us cool videos like  Campus Lawyer. This is a game changer, but not in a good way.

While hope springs eternal, perhaps this shows that the end of huckstering will come before the End of Lawyers.  Maybe next year, Matt Homann will change the name of his program again, this time to LexHardWork.1, or maybe LexZealousRepresentation.2. 

While it will be as superficial and unilluminating as it currently is to try to express the idea that for all the various tools that tech bring lawyers in the performance of their duties, it’s fulfilling our obligation to clients, not the latest device from Apple, that will matter in the future.  Just as it does now. Just as it did 100 years ago.

Sure, the quill gave way to the pen. Carbon paper gave way to the copy machine. Things change, but they have yet to come up with a technological substitute for hard work and excellence.  Maybe this year’s tech show is serving a real purpose by demonstrating that the adoration of new toys and “disruptive ideas” is coming to an end, so lawyers can return to doing the job for which we exist.

And as for those lawyers who raced to the gutter to market themselves as laundry detergent, my game changing prediction is that you can only delude the public for so long. Eventually, they’ll figure out who and what you are.  And it would be really nice if other lawyers who feel as I do would help to bring this disruption to a quick and painful end so we can try to recapture some of the dignity and integrity to which we aspire.