It's fashionable nowadays to talk about reinventing and disrupting the legal profession. We celebrate "legal rebels " — The American Bar Association's list contains many admirable choices. Daniel Katz and Renee Knake, faculty at the Michigan State University's law school, have done the global community a great service with their ReinventLaw events. But I've long felt cognitive dissonance around the reinvent meme.

If something has already been invented, what's the point of reinventing it? If things need to change, shouldn't we focus our energies on inventing something new? We should re-engineer, re-design, re-envision, etc. But why re-do what has already been done? (I know that's not the intention of the reinventers, yet the negative sense is implicit in the word.) Law's already been invented. Let's improve it, not reinvent it.

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