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Showing posts from June, 2021

‘Crazy New Ideas’ in legal innovation

  ‘ Crazy New Ideas ’ is a recent essay by Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator. An accelerator that has backed crazy idea startups that include AIRBNB; letting strangers stay in your home on air mattresses. Unconventional solutions such as STRIPE; 2 lads from Ireland who have revolutionised taking card payments online with an enterprise value close to US$100 bn. And others covering nuclear fusion, biotech, crypto and a privately developed supersonic passenger aircraft. Reading this essay helped framed an idea I’d been mulling: There will never be Crazy New Ideas in legal innovation! And what’s interesting is why we can be confident of this. By innovation I don’t mean adoption of new technology for automation of existing processes for incremental gain. But truly transformative innovation that leads to wholly new processes or outputs. For the simple reason that law is a domain that is tightly constrained by statute and regulation. Certainly there will be improvements in speed and effici