Most sectors treat research and development as a prudent investment in their longevity. Law is an exception. The convention has been that, confronted with a new problem, lawyers learn on the job, at the client’s expense. That has worked well enough when new problems arrived occasionally and clients were willing to pay for the education. It works less well in a world where the problems are arriving constantly and compounding, and our established offerings are inadequate to meet them.
Climate change, resource pressure, geopolitical instability, the accelerating and uncertain capabilities of AI, and shifting confidence in the rule of law are not separate problems arriving in sequence. They cascade and interact, and they are already changing what “good advice” means. Business as usual can still deliver short-term results, but increasingly at the cost of exposure further down the line.
The cost of learning on the job
Take an insurance client. Do you advise on protecting the revenue benefits of continuing to insure and invest in oil and gas? Or do you flag that the same activity threatens the insurer’s future capacity to write cover at all — as property, business interruption and professional indemnity risk become too costly to insure, in that sector and increasingly beyond it — and with knock-on effects for the value of their wider investment portfolio? These are exactly the kind of systemic, interdependent questions that a habit of only dealing with what is immediately in front of us leaves us poorly equipped to respond to. Getting to a good answer requires having thought about the problem before the client walks in the door — which is what R&D, in any other industry, exists to do.
Currently, few firms know what the alternative to business as usual looks like, because the work of finding out hasn’t been done. Teams haven’t been given the space for creative thinking on this, or the permission to experiment, fail, learn and go again — standard practice in R&D functions elsewhere, and conspicuously absent in most law firms.
Why a different kind of thinking matters now
Part of the answer is about how we think, not just what we invest in. One trait that has served lawyers well for a long time is the ability to immerse ourselves in detail — to go deep into the minutiae and build a case for a narrow, specific position. The neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist’s work is useful here, with one caveat: his argument is about modes of attention rather than a literal claim that the two hemispheres of the brain do separate jobs. In his terms, the mode of attention associated with the left hemisphere is precisely what makes lawyers good at focused, detailed casework. But the mode associated with the right hemisphere, McGilchrist argues, “has a much better grasp of the whole” — and it is that, the contextual, interdependent view, that is valuable in developing responses to systemic risk and pervasive volatility. The left-hemisphere mode shouldn’t be discarded; McGilchrist’s own framing is that it should serve as emissary rather than master, providing the detail to augment the reading of the wider context.
Put plainly, stability now depends on the capacity to adapt, not on repeating what has worked before. That means continuous, in-the-moment responses to what’s in front of us, combined with genuine anticipation of what’s coming — and anticipation is a right-brain-mode skill that most legal training doesn’t build.
What legal R&D could look like
There are different ways this could be approached. It could mean a version of Google’s ‘20% time,’ where staff spend a day a week exploring their own ideas and hunches, on the basis that even one success can justify the investment many times over. It could mean inviting teams to form around issues the firm identifies, sometimes in conversation with key clients. It could mean bringing in outside support — to guide the process, to bring perspectives from other sectors, or simply as an example of lateral thinking done well. What matters most is treating this time as equally valuable as fee-earning work, and disseminating what’s learned across the business — the failures as openly as the successes.
None of this is exotic; it is standard R&D practice in almost every other sector. What’s missing in law is not the method, but the permission and the budget line.
That budget question is timely. As The Lawyer has reported, a number of large firms are sitting on war chests running into the tens, and in some cases hundreds, of millions of pounds, with a good part of it earmarked for AI. Few firms would consciously choose to put all of that budget in one basket — yet that’s the direction heavy, AI-only spending takes them. Whilst a firm’s principal asset remains its people, training that builds underused capacities for anticipation, synthesis and contextual judgement is a natural complement to AI investment.
Where to start
The firms that get ahead of this won’t be the ones that wait for certainty before acting — there won’t be any. They will be the ones that treat R&D as a line item, give a small team explicit permission to experiment on a live problem, and build the muscles for anticipation and systemic perspectives alongside the muscle for detail. As Buckminster Fuller put it, you don’t change things by fighting the existing reality; you change them by building a new model that makes the existing one obsolete. For law firms, that new model starts with deciding that R&D is not optional.
David Hunter is senior counsel at Bates Wells