Maker5's Sanjay Kamlani on the Who, What, and How of Legal Innovation

This week's guest is Maker5, Inc. CEO and Founder Sanjay Kamlani. Sanjay's experience of creating businesses like Office Tiger and Pangea3 give him a unique view of the legal technology and innovation sector, and specifically what tends to work well, and what tends to fall short when it comes to true innovation. Maker5, Inc is a Venture Studio designed to incubate its own businesses to spin them off as independent businesses, as well as being an advisory to law firms and software development services for law firms. When it comes to internal innovation, Sanjay's view is that  the CIO and CTO do not have enough practicing lawyers integrated with what they're trying to accomplish at the firm. Too often firms try to innovate in a vacuum, without the input and guidance of innovation partners or practicing attorneys and they end up not having any real authority or responsibility for implementing the innovative project. 

In addition to development structure, there are also cultural disincentives to adopting true innovation, especially in the law firm setting. 

"If you think about how most firms are focused 100% on the billable hour, and then you start thinking about what technology achieves ... that ends up reducing billable hours, you immediately start to realize that there's a big contradiction.... Unless you have an incentive structure that is consistent with the notion of efficiency and better, faster, cheaper, you're not going to get adoption, everyone's going to run in the opposite direction of that tool." - Sanjay Kamlani

We walk through the processes of coming up with innovative ideas, whether to build it internally or find an off the shelf version, implementation and adoption, and the continuing maintenance of the innovation on a full-time scalable basis. Something that very few law firms are set up to do from start to finish. Kamlani identifies a number of processes that need to be in place, and what questions need to be asked and answered throughout the innovation creation, implementation, adoption, and maintenance lifecycle. It is a fascinating look into innovation that many of us may not have had the opportunity to experience. 

Information Inspirations

If you have not checked out the #SKILLS22 conference content, Greg's overview of all 20 sessions can help you find the right session to watch.

Marlene covers more on the Great Resignation from a Boston College report that breaks down who are leaving their jobs and some of the details of what certain sectors of the US population are affected more than others.

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Transcript is available on 3 Geeks and a Law Blog