I take it back – there is a bit of revolution

Having blogged last week about how the revolution in law still shows no sign of actually turning up, I got the chance this week to size up the current level of innovation in the profession while doing my bit to help the judging process for the 2009 British Legal Awards.

The award-winners are decided by an independent panel of judges made up of general counsel and retired lawyers, but this year Legal Week's editorial team has taken on the job of whittling down the entries into shortlists for our judges' consideration.

So with some trepidation I took on the Law Firm Innovation category - trepidation as it proved the most popular category with 27 entries, comprising well over 20,000 words of material (which, I'm not proud to admit, I actually read).

And, perhaps because of Bill Knight's advice on legalweek.com on how to compose a decent entry or because law is a hitherto unrealised hotbed of creativity, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of entries.

Of the 27 submissions, there were only a handful of misfires. The scale of innovation on offer also wasn't bad. The creative thinking covered virtual law firms, an individual lawyer becoming a company to hire out their services, digitising and selling legal information (twice) and a few examples of low-tech but well-judged business development. There were also outbreaks of offshoring, creativity with staffing issues and one cracking bit of cutting-edge deal-lawyering.

And while I'm still not convinced that we're set for a revolution in legal services - at least not one the law firms themselves are dreaming up - perhaps there's hope that the legal profession can keep itself up to date (I haven't yet seen the entries for the In-house Innovation category, so maybe clients have got something even more radical in mind).

Ironically given the market conditions, the other category that proved a big hit with entrants was Banking, Finance and Restructuring, which hauled in more than 20 submissions. Again, speaking as someone who must by now have suffered mental damage from excessive exposure to inane law firm marketing, most entries were refreshingly to-the-point, with firms getting the hang of providing supporting material and even that tricky client recommendation thing.

The other duty Legal Week's editorial team was called on was to come up with the shortlist for the Law Firm of the Year award. We have written a briefing note for the judges to chew over, which we will publish on this blog ahead of the awards. We will be unveiling the full shortlist later this month, with the main event scheduled for 3 December.

Everyone knows award ceremonies are frequently tiresome, so our mission statement with the British Legal Awards has always been to keep that element to a bare minimum and make the judging process as logical and credible as possible, and hopefully even encourage outbreaks of fun and merriment. Hopefully we'll see a fair few of you there.

For more information on the event, click here.