6 books for legal pioneers 📕

If your New Year’s resolution was to read more, I’m here to help you out.

If you want exposure to new ideas, modes of thinking and a compounded aggregate of diverse knowledge, then reading is important. With summer coming up, it’s time to explore some new prints.

Below are the some of the most influential business books for legal practitioners, if you’re looking to start with those most worth your time.

Get out your reading glasses — and get excited.

Tomorrow’s Lawyers — Richard Susskin

Tomorrow’s Lawyers predicts the beginning of a period of fundamental transformation in the legal industry. Where the future of the legal service will be a world of internet-based global businesses, online document production, commoditized service, legal process outsourcing, and web based practices.

This book is a definitive guide to this future — for young and aspiring lawyers, and for all who want to modernize our legal and justice systems. It introduces the new legal landscape and offers practical guidance for those who intend to build careers and businesses in law.

Susskind identifies key drivers of change and considers how these will impact the legal marketplace. In the second part, the author sketches out the new legal landscape as he predicts it, including the changing role of law firms and in-house lawyers. The third part focuses on the prospects for aspiring lawyers, predicting what new jobs and new employers there will be like.

Law by Design — Margaret Hagan

In this e-book, Margaret Hagan advocates a design-driven approach to legal innovation. Design is the way to generate promising ideas for how legal services could be improved, and then get them developed in quick and effective ways.

Hagan sets forth an agenda for innovation in legal services, with practical, agile and user-centered methods to make the legal system clearer, more efficient, more usable and friendlier. It focuses on how the experience of law can be improved.

The book is unusual in at least two ways. First, it is expressly ‘a work in progress’ which the author hopes will continue to grow. Second, the linear argument is interspersed with drawings, doodles and contributions in the form that they might be written on a white board.

Lean Pricing — Omar Mohout

A lot has been written about the end of the traditional pricing model for legal services. Want to go beyond the billable hour? This book provides an overview of the most used and most successful pricing strategies.

Although primarily at startups, Lean Pricing provides a practical toolkit that will positively influence your pricing strategy, revealing insights in the different pricing methods and tactics used by successful companies.

You will discover a great number of case studies in which the strategies are successfully applied to help you optimize your current pricing strategy.

Business Model Generation — Alexander Osterwalder

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models. If your organization want to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don’t yet have a strategy, you need start exploring the business model canvas.

The book explains the most common business model patterns and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. It will teach you how to systematically design and implement a game-changing business model or analyze and renovate an old one.

If you’re already familiar with the business model canvas, you might want to check out the Agile Attorney Practice Model Canvas and the Service Model Canvas for legal departments.

Hacking Growth — Sean Ellis

Looking for new ways to stand out from the crowd and grow your business? Sean Ellis’ growth hacking bible explains how to hack your way through business metrics with cases studies from Silicon Valley.

This book is a comprehensive toolkit for any company in any industry to implement their own Growth Hacking strategy, from set-up to running growth teams, to how to identify and test growth levers, and how to evaluate and act upon the results.

If you already know a thing or two about value-based pricing, productized services and behavioral psychology, this book will help you achieve exponential growth.

Start with Why — Simon Sinek

Why are some people and organizations more inventive, pioneering and successful than others? And why are they able to repeat their success again and again? In business, it doesn’t matter what you do, it matters why.

Simon Sinek explains the framework needed for businesses to move past knowing what they do to how they do it, and then to ask the more important question — Why? Why do we do what we do?

The authors’ Golden Circle framework offers an interesting insight in to why some leaders and organizations have achieved such an exceptional degree of influence, and why other haven’t. Ready to find out?