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CCCA_V6No3_Q&A_Lippe-FIN_CCCA 9/19/12 10:49 AM Page 38 Feature alism, which is you’ve got to follow everything down the line. It’s great to be a brilliant brain surgeon, but I think the world needs more people who can run big health systems and make sure peo- ple stay healthy.Will law firms be able to comprehend that? There’s no particular evidence that that’s happening. To the extent they would, then they would start to look at system-level services. For example, they could say: ‘You’ll pay us $700,000 a year or $2-million and we’ll handle all your employment problems. And every time we work on an employment problem, we go back to you and say: Here’s the three things that led to that problem.’ Or ‘we’ve noticed that [the company] has 114 managers in Canada but 80 per cent of your employment problems are associated CELEBRATING 20 YEARS with two or three people.’ But that kind of systemic view is very rare in law firms. I think for most people it would be more professionally grat- ifying and could be more profitable. excellence CCCA Is it hard for lawyers to change the way they do business? ADVICE. REPRESENTATION. OUTCOME. PL Lawyers have what I would call a constitutional convention model of change. We put on our long socks, and we ride down to Philadelphia and we debate it, and we vote yea or nay, and if we vote yea then we all agree we’ll follow it. It’s formalistic, it’s rule-based, it’s agenda, it’s consensual. [When Steve Jobs invented the iPhone] there was no iPhone users convention, there was no decision. But that’s not how lawyers think of change. Lawyers think, ‘Well, if I don’t get in the room and vote for the iPhone then the iPhone doesn’t happen.’ As a result, I think we’re relatively unsophisticated about how we think of change. If I’m a law firm and I have a majority or super-majority decision-making model, which most law firms do, and if I can’t do something until it becomes obvious to the majority or super-majority of my people that it’s a good idea, then I’m going to do it later than most people. That’s not good. It’s not bad. But I can’t run around and think, ‘Oh, aren’t I clever because I adopted a wait-and-see attitude.’ Affleck Greene McMurtry LLP Dude, you’ve built that into the way you run the place. 365 Bay Street, Suite 200 So the question becomes, given that I’m always going to adopt a Toronto, Canada M5H 2V1 wait-and-see attitude, does that actually create a risk for me in terms of being a slow learner? You can’t be an infinitely late adopter. T 416.360.2800 F 416.360.5960 >}>ÜÞiÀðVÊÊUÊÊÌiÌ}>ÌÀ°V> CCCA What are the risks? PL You will learn less quickly than others how to deliver supe- rior value to clients, and therefore you will fall off what should be your appropriate professional trajectory. Excellence in Litigation and Competition Law This interview was edited and condensed for publication.