Innovation in legal services: The practices that influence ideation and codification activities

Abstract

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Barriers and opportunities to innovation for legal service firms: a thematic analysis-based contextualization

“…It also maps out areas of opportunity for innovation uptake that have not seen enough 'investment' yet but are acknowledged by legal professionals as fields where innovative interventions could be timely and meaningful. Our study, which drew from the RBV and PBV elements to inform the nature, context, and content of data collection (focussing on human resources and organizational capital issues, the efficiency of legal processes, technology uptake, and knowledge transfer), thus highlights some of the misconceptions of innovation drawing similarities to Bourke, Roper, and Love (2020) conceptual framework around 'activities' and 'practices'.…”

“…An important constituent of the professional service law firm is the knowledge, networks, skills, and performance that is embodied and embedded in its partners and lawyers, where purchasing idiosyncratic knowledge bases, skills, and often the experiences of legal professionals (Beaverstock 2004;Beaverstock, Taylor, and Smith 1999;Bourke, Roper, and Love 2020). Significant changes in technology, client sophistication, and general resistance to change have brought the tenuous viability and effectiveness of the traditional law firm business model in need of a paradigmatic shift (Moore and Haji 2017).…”

“…It is one of the best ways for a company to reach its performance objectives (Robert et al 2019) especially for service companies that typically lack an in-depth understanding of the practices that can be implemented to improve their operations' efficiency (Belvedere 2014). Innovation for the professional service sector is the entrance of new technological tools, the effective management of employees, and the transformation of employees' knowledge into services (Clegg, Balthu, and Morris 2020;Bourke, Roper, and Love 2020). Service innovation is, therefore, a type of service blueprinting (Radnor et al 2014) that is designed to enhance the service delivery system and its constituent elements and processes.…”

“…There are a few examples in the literature (e.g. Roper, Love, and Bourke 2016;Desyllas et al 2018;Moore and Haji 2017;Bourke, Roper, and Love 2020) where scholars explored the role or drivers for innovation in the legal services but as a whole law is a severely under-researched industry (Segal-Horn and Dean 2007). There is a scarcity of operations management research that has focussed on identifying how the legal service sector embraces innovation and to what extent this is appreciated by and influences the working lives of legal professionals.…”

The role of human sustainability in professional service firms. Evidence from Italy

“…The growing attention on human sustainability might clash with the thriving challenges of continuous innovation required by sophisticated clients; the need to pursue crescent efficiency creates increasing pressure on people (Smets, 2016). Indeed, in professional service practices, innovation capacity strongly depends on people rather than on technological infrastructures (Bourke, Roper & Love, 2020). Previous studies have also shown how managerial practices implemented to increase human sustainability had an unexpected positive impact on innovation capacity (Smets, 2016).…”