For my money, the two groups voting “innovation’s not happening here” and “no investors are coming near us” (about 65% in total) have history and clarity of vision on their side. To the remaining one-third thinking we “can innovate today if [we] choose to,” I’m tempted to say: Show me, don’t tell me.

The ball is in your court.

bruce-survey-slides.p4

Wow.

99.4% say that LPO’s are a force to be reckoned with, split about 50/50 between “they’re coming” and “they’re already here,” with a small tail (<6%) saying they’re not yet visible but soon will be. I don’t know who the lone respondent was predicting it will never happen, but if there’s such a thing as reincarnation I’d like to come back living in that person’s world. (Actually, I wouldn’t, but that’s a conversation for another day, with a psychiatrist in the room, not lawyers and economists.)

If I were on the LPO side of the market, I’d take this news triumphantly (“Resistance is futile”), and if I were on the BigLaw side of the market, I’d start planning my response (“Denial is futile”). Which brings us to the final question, “What’s to be done?”

bruce-survey-slides.p5

Here we split 60/40. The 40% say we can “fight back [by] honing our conventional model” while 30% say we can fight back by emulating LPOs and creating our own captives, and another (nearly) 30% say we “have no credible or effective defense in the long run.”

Before I tell you what the comments reveal, let’s take the numbers at face value.

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