Lessons from a Decade of Innovation

COLUMN > Innovation in Law

BY JORDAN L. COUCH

I recently celebrated my 10th year practicing law. Ten years of experimenting, failing, arguing, and winning occasionally. Most importantly, I have watched the legal profession slowly, fitfully, and sometimes reluctantly change. All of this has left me with more lessons than I can fit in a single article. What follows is my best attempt to distill them.

I want to be clear about what this is and is not. This is not a victory lap. Some of the things I believed most confidently a decade ago turned out to be wrong. Some of the arguments I made boldly in print came back to humble me. And some of the changes I expected to see by now still haven’t arrived. It’s been nothing if not a learning experience and I wanted to share some of those lessons with all of you—so here, in no particular order, are my lessons learned from a decade of innovation.

1. The Little Things Matter Most

I have written a lot of words in this column on big ideas: access to justice, regulatory reform, technological advances, the transformation of the legal profession. All of that matters for success in legal practice. But when I look back at what has actually moved the needle at my firm, Palace Law, it’s usually something mundane. Did we call the client back the same day? Did we explain the outcome in plain language and not legalese? Did we set a clear expectation and then meet it?

Client service is not a philosophy; it is a practice, and the practice is mostly small. Communicating clearly. Communicating on time. Doing what you said you would do. I have seen firms with brilliant lawyers and sophisticated technology lose clients to firms with neither, simply because those firms were better at the basics. If you take nothing else from this column, take that.

2. Just Because It Seems Obvious Doesn’t Mean It Is

A few years ago, I led a roundtable at the ABA TechShow. It was one of those sessions where the audience does most of the talking, and the question I led with was “What is something you love to do in your practice that you assume everyone is doing?” One practitioner said he has a business card holder outside his door so potential clients can grab his info even when the office is closed. Another attorney shared how he has a second monitor set up vertically to make the view better for reading and writing documents. For every “obvious” idea, the majority of the people at the table had never thought of it before.

I had a similar experience writing an article on the rules of evidence recently. I hesitated for a long time before writing it because the rules of evidence have been written and edited by people who have thought a lot more about them than I have. Any idea I had has already been thought of, right? But I had opinions, I wrote them down, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

Say the thing you think everyone already knows. Someone in the room doesn’t know it. And the act of saying it clearly, in your own words, often reveals that what you thought was obvious is actually more complicated than you realized.

3. People, Then Process, Then Technology

I have written about process before technology previously in this column. I still believe it. But a decade of watching firms try and fail at innovation has taught me to add a step before process: people.

The wrong people won’t follow your process no matter how well designed it is. And the right people will do more than follow your process, they will help you build it, improve it, and tell you when it’s broken. Some of my best process improvements at Palace Law came from staff members who had every reason to resist change and instead became its strongest advocates. I once took my most tech-averse paralegal and made her a lead partner on our new client communication software rollout. She found problems I never would have found. She also became its biggest champion and having her as the champion brought the whole team along easily.

The other thing I’ve learned about this hierarchy: it loops. People, then process, then technology, then back to people again. As your firm changes, the people need to grow with you. Technology embedded in a process is useful. Technology that shapes the process from the beginning is better. Technology that was designed around the actual needs of the people using it is best. You don’t reach that last stage by deploying software. You reach it by bringing people along. And if people cannot grow with your firm they will have to grow out of your firm.

4. Embrace Failure Carefully

Not for your clients. Let me be direct about that. The bar we hold ourselves to in our legal work is excellence, and experimentation at the expense of client outcomes is not innovation—it’s negligence.

But in your systems, your processes, your service delivery? Fail early and often. The firms that have advanced the fastest in this decade are not the ones that got everything right. They’re the ones that tried small experiments quickly, paid attention to what happened, and adjusted. I’ve found it helps to enlist your clients in this when you can—not to make them guinea pigs, but to make them partners. Explain what you’re trying and ask for their participation and feedback. Most clients are more forgiving of imperfection than lawyers assume, as long as you’re being transparent and working in good faith.

I’ll also say this: experimentation and failure can be embraced in your legal work as well, as long as you do it in a way that cannot adversely affect your client. Be willing to make the argument you’re not sure you’ll win. I’ve lost four out of five creative jury-instruction arguments in recent years. I’ve had a case go to the Washington Supreme Court on a theory my colleagues thought was a long shot. The loss record doesn’t bother me. You only need to win some of the time, and you’ll never win the argument you don’t make.

---

I’ve learned the difference between speaking boldly and speaking with certainty. You can do the former without claiming the latter.

---

5. Be Open to Being Wrong

I have been wrong in print—publicly, in this publication, with my name on it.

There was a regulatory reform proposal I believed in, argued for, and watched fail, not because reformers lost, but because something different (and I would argue better) emerged. My version wasn’t the version that passed, and the version that passed has done real good for access to justice. I’ve also taken positions on the bar exam that generated pushback from people and entities I’ll leave nameless, and I had to sit with the discomfort of not knowing whether the pushback was right. Sometimes it was.

None of this has made me quieter. If anything, it has made me more willing to speak, because I’ve learned the difference between speaking boldly and speaking with certainty. You can do the former without claiming the latter. Say what you think. Mean it. Update when you’re wrong. That combination—confident enough to speak, humble enough to revise—is what intellectual honesty looks like in practice.

6. It’s Easier Than You Think to Become the Expert

Obviously, I am not the best workers compensation attorney in the state of Washington, but on a more honest level I do probably know more about using clerical and other errors to evade res judicata than at least 95 percent of workers compensation attorneys in the state. That is a very narrow lane. It is also genuinely useful, and it took me years of showing up, writing, arguing, researching, and attending the meetings that felt optional to develop it.

The barrier to becoming a recognized voice on something is lower than most lawyers believe. You cannot be the expert on everything, but you can absolutely be the expert on something. Pick a lane narrow enough to be achievable. Show up consistently in that lane. Say something specific and honest. The expertise compounds over time, and the opportunities follow.

7. Being Early Is Both an Advantage and a Tax

I have been a big social media guy in my legal career. I was on TikTok before most lawyers knew what it was. Growing a following there was genuinely easy for a while—the algorithm rewarded early movers. Twitter was the opposite: a late start, years of grinding, relationship-building, showing up in conversations with no immediate payoff. And Clubhouse? I invested real time into Clubhouse. Now Clubhouse is gone.

This pattern repeats across every cutting-edge idea in the legal profession, not just technology. Being early creates opportunities that aren’t available to later arrivals. It also means you will sometimes be wrong about which things matter, and you’ll absorb the cost of finding out. That’s not a reason to stop being early. It’s just part of the deal, and you should know it going in.

One thing I’ve learned to look for: the impact of early work is often invisible until it isn’t. I have received messages from lawyers I’ve never met, from law students, from a few people who have shaped real policy telling me that something I wrote years ago changed how they thought about a problem. I had no idea at the time. The work went out, and I moved on, and somewhere downstream it landed. You often won’t see the impact. That doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

8. You Are Not Alone

The work I’m most proud of in my legal career and volunteer work—the big cases, the jury victories, the regulatory reforms, the access-to-justice arguments, the column you’re reading right now—none of it happened alone. None of my work would have amounted to as much without my business partner, Patrick Palace. I’ve collaborated on this column with great friends like Theresa Mattich and Ariel Cook, and my WSBA service has relied on more people than I could possibly name. Innovative lawyers are everywhere and the more we work together the better our work becomes.

Sometimes lawyers mistakenly see other lawyers as competition. But legal services are not zero-sum. The majority of people who need a lawyer don’t know they need one, haven’t thought to look for one, and won’t hire one unless someone in this profession makes it possible for them to do so. The pie is not fixed. A rising tide raises all ships, and the tide rises when we collaborate, share what we know, and resist the instinct to protect our corner of a profession that should be much larger and much more accessible than it currently is.

Ten years ago I started writing this column hoping to contribute something useful to a profession I love and believe in. I’m still doing that. I hope some of what I’ve learned along the way is useful to you too.