How Staying Old School Isolates Your Clients From The Digital Ecosystem

The future is about all clients in networks

Jim Hackett has a bit of idol worship going on in Michigan. If you don’t know Jim (I don’t), this is his recent resume. He was CEO of Steelcase, the largest office furniture manufacture, where he used design thinking to propel the business. He retired, then took on a new gig — interim athletic director for the University of Michigan. While in that role, he brought on board Jim Harbaugh as head football coach for the Wolverines. Think of that one as a huge win for the school’s football program, which Harbaugh turned around in one season. From there, he went to Ford where he became chairman of Ford Smart Mobility, the subsidiary focused on self-driving cars. And from there, he became CEO of Ford. Not a bad day’s work.

Hackett has been a fan of IDEO, the design shop of brothers Tim and David Kelley, since his days at Steelcase. He sees the design challenge, and Ford’s response as something beyond cars. As one article noted, “the company plans to approach self-driving cars as vehicles within a larger ecosystem of autonomous cars–not just as standalone design objects. [Hackett] believes that some kind of network will one day dominate all transportation.”

Hackett sees Ford’s future in much the same way many of us describe the legal industry — much of it is stuck in the past that worked on a specific paradigm. Now, that paradigm will undergo rapid change:

This is part of the puzzle, which is trying to step back and say, how much of the nature of vehicles and transportation is mired in a past that was able to stay persistent for more than a few decades … A past where what guided your vehicle was a driver, a past where what gave you a sense of rules and controls were traffic lights and stop signs and lines painted on streets. Those have lasted for a long, long time. That’s all going to change.

It is this ecosystem point that many lawyers miss. Doing a contract and putting it in a drawer is the old way. The new way will involve contracts connected to case law connected to other contracts connected to payments systems. Failing to learn digital technologies doesn’t mean you will lose out on contract automation, it means your client will be cutoff from the inter-connected universe of digital commerce.

Call it the network effect, legal instruments are about to stop living on analog islands and move into the world of Internet of Things and cyberspace. If you don’t believe me, just ask Alexa.

About: Ken is a speaker and author on innovation and on the future of people, process, and technology. He is a Fastcase 50 recipient, a Fellow-Elect of the College of Law Practice Management, and a Medium “Top 50” writer on Innovation. He is an Adjunct Professor at Michigan State University’s College of Law and a Member of its LegalRnD Faculty. You can follow him on Twitter @LeanLawStrategy, connect with him on LinkedIn, and follow him on Facebook.