Stop hiring an innovation team. Start shipping.

I’m going to say something that will annoy a few people I like, some of whom have “innovation” in their job titles. The legal innovation team, as most firms have implemented it, has become a sophisticated way of not innovating. It’s the mechanism by which a firm convinces itself it’s changing while changing as little as possible - and the alternative is much less comfortable and much more effective: just ship things.

Let me be precise about what I mean, because there are good people in these roles doing real work despite the structure, not because of it.

What the innovation team is actually for

Watch how innovation functions are usually set up and the real purpose becomes clear. A firm feels the pressure to “do something about AI” or “be innovative.” Setting up an innovation team is a legible, announceable response - you can put it in a press release, mention it to clients, point to it in a pitch. It demonstrates seriousness.

But notice what it also does, structurally: it contains innovation. It takes the disruptive, uncomfortable, change-the-business stuff and puts it in a box, off to the side, where it can be admired without disturbing how the firm actually makes money. The innovation team becomes the place where transformation goes to be managed - which usually means slowed, committee-d, and kept safely away from the real work and the real P&L. The function designed to drive change becomes the firm’s primary defence against it.

This isn’t anyone’s fault individually. It’s what the structure is optimised to do. An innovation team that genuinely disrupted the firm’s core economics would be threatening, so the firm - by a thousand small decisions about budget, authority, and reporting lines - quietly ensures it doesn’t. And everyone gets to feel innovative without anything load-bearing changing.

The tell: theatre versus shipping

There’s a clean test for whether an innovation function is real or theatre. Real innovation ships things that change what people do. Theatre produces artefacts about innovation - strategies, frameworks, horizon scans, pilot reports, innovation showcases, a quarterly newsletter about emerging trends.

If you look at an innovation team’s output over a year and it’s mostly artefacts - decks, reports, events, committees - and very few things that are actually in use by fee-earners changing how they work, you have theatre. Well-intentioned, often intelligent, frequently expensive theatre. The artefacts feel like progress because they’re tangible and they’re about the right topics. But a horizon-scan deck has never once changed what a lawyer does on a Tuesday. Only a shipped, adopted thing does that.

What “start shipping” actually means

The alternative to the innovation team isn’t “don’t try to innovate.” It’s to organise around shipping rather than around innovating-as-a-topic. Concretely:

Pick one painful, real task and make a better way of doing it actually used by actual fee-earners. Not a pilot, not a proof of concept, not a showcase. A thing that is genuinely in the workflow, changing what people do. One shipped, adopted change is worth more than a year of strategy, because it’s the only kind of output that compounds.

Measure the function on adoption, not activity. Not “how many pilots did we run” or “how many innovations did we explore” but “how many things are fee-earners actually using now that they weren’t a year ago.” Activity is theatre’s favourite metric because you can always generate more of it. Adoption is the only metric that can’t be faked, because it requires a real person to actually change.

Give it the authority and the access to ship into the real business. The reason innovation gets contained is that it’s kept away from the core. A function that’s allowed to actually change how a practice group works - with the authority to do it and the mandate to measure adoption - is a function that can ship. One kept safely to the side, producing artefacts, cannot, no matter how talented the people.

Treat what you ship as a product, not a project. The shipped thing needs an owner past launch, a feedback loop, a second-year budget. Otherwise you’ve just produced a more elaborate artefact that happens to have briefly worked.

The uncomfortable reframe

The reframe I’d offer any firm is this: you don’t have an innovation problem that an innovation team solves. You have a shipping problem - an inability to get genuinely better ways of working into the hands of fee-earners and to make them stick. And a shipping problem is not solved by a team that produces strategies about shipping. It’s solved by shipping.

So if I were a managing partner reviewing my innovation function, I wouldn’t ask “are we exploring the right trends?” or “is our AI strategy ambitious enough?” I’d ask one question: in the last year, what did we put into the hands of fee-earners that changed what they actually do, and how many of them are still using it? If the honest answer is “not much, but we’ve got a great roadmap,” then what you have is theatre with a budget, and the kindest and most effective thing you can do is stop admiring the roadmap and ship one real thing.

Innovation isn’t a department. It’s a verb, and the verb is shipping. Everything else is the firm reassuring itself.