Walking down the main drag in Provincetown the other day, I found a pile of books in front of an apartment that had been cleaned out. I took a few related to things I wanted to read up on—probability theory and microeconomics. Later, I realized that they had belonged to a Nobel laureate economist who had just died. I wonder whether that will make them more valuable. I guess I will have to find a rational consumer and ask.
As I have assumed a leadership position in a bar group, one of the things I do is go to symposia where the future of the profession is discussed. I heard Clayton Christenson at Harvard’s Law School the other day discuss whether his theories of market disruption were applicable to the marketplace for legal services. His presentation was responded to and critiqued by four or five others, some of whom thought that the way lawyers do things was so effective and efficient that it was resistant to change. Others wondered whether the concept of transformative disruption would not fundamentally change the entire world of legal services.
