Lawyers: Risk Aversion = Missed Opportunities

Link: Strategic Legal Technology :: Risk Aversion and the Failure to Consider Alternatives. This little snippet is indicative of why many law firms will be slow to leverage the Internet in an aggressive way. It seems that lawyers are mostly trained to think that legal risk (liability) is somehow different from other kinds of business risk, that it lives in a kind of vacuum. That is why entrepreneurs often resist having lawyers participate directly in deal making, only bringing them in after the fact.

The Internet is a chaotic environment and obviously the online world has as much legal liability inherent in it as the business world in general. However, notice that this has not stopped the best and the brightest from forging new business models and inventing new industries out of whole cloth.

My point is this, those firms that are willing to take some calculated risks with their Internet strategy are likely, if executed properly, to build a sustainable competitive advantage if for no other reason that most of their competitors will be slow to follow. Slow on the Internet is a death knell. Once a prime piece of real estate is established it is difficult to move into the neighborhood.

Expect most of the innovation to come from attorneys that were born digital. They get it more than their elder brethren and have a lot less to lose.