If you want to be an innovative legal organisation, you simply need to motivate lawyers to innovate.
I already summarised the five mindsets that every lawyer should drop to actually innovate here.
On the other hand, to be successful, innovation efforts need to be multi-directional. Bottom-up. Top-to-bottom. Left-to-right. Diagonal. 3D. You name it.
So how to motivate lawyer colleagues to find time for innovation even when flooded with Client work, internal stakeholders’ needs, and all sorts of general pressure?
Read my six (6) tips on how to motivate lawyers to innovate!

#1 Empower
People like autonomy and love tinkering.
So your first step should be to give your people something to tinker with.
Může se jednat o sandboxes, demos, innovation labs… Any safe place to get their hands dirty without having to ask someone for help and/or permission.
If someone has an a-ha! moment, they need to get up and running asap. Feeling like you can do something real yourself is important.
Give this power to individuals, even if you have a designated innovation team. It is a lot less hard and intimidating to pitch an idea if you already have some idea on how it may work.
Besides, doing something independently with a tool for the first time when the client is already on board is way too late.
How to motivate lawyers to innovate by empowering them? Throw agency around like confetti and allow anyone to try out even a seemingly stupid idea every once in a while. Don’t overly check on them in the meantime.
#2 Listen
To be honest, this is the hardest for me, personally.
I train my colleagues all the time (here is how I do it!), so I naturally love sharing shortcuts, tips, and breakthroughs. I mean – I run a legal innovation blog!
Ale pozor, empathic listening is one of the strongest tools. Ask your peers about their problems, their feelings, and reservations. And after you carefully listen to their answer, go and give them the gadgets to get it done.
Tailored innovation advice will always convey the value of innovation a million times better than showering one-size-fits-all fixes.
How to motivate lawyers to innovate by listening? Listen to people and then go back to #1
#3 Celebrate
If someone comes up with something cool, throw a party.
Talk about the solution on your team review.
Give them a cupcake.
Make them Innovator of the Month (that gets a cupcake).
Be loud and deliberate about giving credit and voice to those who promote healthy and innovative culture in your company.
Tweet
Thompson Reuters once published a post on the Archangels of Innovation as “a driving force behind the legal innovation movement and should be rewarded as such. However, they are are neither acknowledged or supported very much by their organizations at the moment.” And that is very true and very awful.
Don’t be part of the problem.
How to motivate lawyers to innovate by celebrating? Give your innovators a cupcake (and by cupcake, I mean agency and recognition).
#4 Inspire & share
Take a moment to compare the tech industry (vastly disruptive) and law (not). Where is the key difference?
Besides being empowered by technology, a big thing is that IT is inherently open source. So much is shared, and through the act of sharing, inspiration and new ideas keep on flooding in.
You probably can’t share your template bank online. But you can be that one colleague who showcases all the cool tricks.
How to motivate by inspiring? Show them what you did, how it works. Train people. Talk about ROI on your past projects and why did they work. Or why they didn’t.
#5 Measure
In order to make the whole thing make sense, you need metrics.
For a starter, include time for innovation in your KPI (and make sure everyone know how this is evaluated). But law isn’t just about the hours (here, I said it!!!). Look at benchmarks of products, usage of your tools, ROI, satisfaction rates, whatever will help you understand where you are.
Put some qualitative metrics in the bunch as well (hence #2). Listen to how people are feeling about all that.
Without having your metrics, any effort is likely to fade and be forgotten.
How to motivate lawyers to innovate using metrics? In the UN we used to say: you measure what you treasure. Put the effort to show that innovation matters and how.
#6 Create opportunities
Innovation does not just happen. Just like with everything in life, sometimes it takes getting a cup of coffee and sometimes the $$ for innovation education programme.
How to create opportunities for innovation? Get people together. Throw a hackathon, roundtable, gaming night, whatever works in the context of your team.
Shrnutí na konec
Innovation is a lot of play that requires a lot of work. So take it easy on yourself.
- Don’t beat yourself up when people hate your tool or your approach.
- Accept that you will not make everyone a fan (think of 80/20 rule), and
- Please keep on reading Attorney@Code even if these six tips will not help you convince everyone at Corp that doing all corporate resolutions manually is so 1990.
If it doesn’t work, have a cup of coffee or start learning to code.
By acknowledging the need to evolve, you’re already up for a head start.
-Attorney@Code

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