During the last decade, countless predictions were made about the coming age of innovation in the legal industry, but there was only marginal, incremental change. As Danish physicist Neil Bohrs once said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”

Something no one predicted is that it would take a global pandemic to finally usher in an era of actual innovation—that is, implementing change, not merely talking about it. Law firms have been forced to change more in the past six weeks than in the previous 10 years combined. Innovation has always been one of those loose, difficult-to-define words, but now we’re getting a taste of what it really means. Nothing awakens necessity more than a crisis.