FT Innovative Lawyers 2008 Many corporate readers of this year’s FT Innovative Lawyers report may raise their eyebrows that initiatives such as producing a survey on climate change or adopting a matrix approach to management are considered innovative. Despite being billion dollar businesses, law firms have traditionally given little thought to the future or to research and development. Usually, legal innovators look to the corporate sector for their ideas.
Yet the past year has seen a lot of activity in the legal world. International law firms such as Eversheds are producing reports on how the legal sector will evolve this century. Symposiums on the future of the global law firm are being run at prestigious universities such as Georgetown in the US. BT, the UK group, has introduced a campaign to promote diversity among the law firms it uses. The sector, which witnessed great change in the past decade, appears to be getting ready for even more dramatic change over the next.
