Over the weekend I posted a response to
@BLawarticle about Multiple Disciplinary Teams, and the idea that many lawyers think MTD's should only include other lawyers. This is a deeply flawed view by Attorneys and a mistake in thinking that I once held.

I once took a job at a firm that had broad ambitions about building and scaling. They had a strong marketing presence, were able to convert leads to clients and had extremely gifted and skilled lawyers. To this day, I really like and believe in the leadership team.

It was composed of people with a variety of professional expertise, but they were ALL Lawyers engaged in traditional practice on a daily basis. I was hired to help scale their intake and client acquisition process as well as oversee practice Innovation.

I knew going in it would require a small portion of traditional practice work, which I was willing to take that on for such a dream role. I loved this firm and where it could go. I loved the idea that I would have a hand in shaping a 21st century practice.

Enter mission creep. The amount of time I spent on “traditional” practice roles was larger then I anticipated and this was true for the other members of our MTD team. We all spent *a lot* of time practicing.

I worked at that firm about six months and have nothing but positive things to say about the leadership, my colleagues and the work we did. I noticed around month 2 that every business decision was made by a group of attorneys all engaged in traditional practice.

The lens we used to problem solve therefore was focused on day to day practice. It was not innovation, not about design thinking, not technology, but traditional practice management. It kept the view very narrow.

I often think how much we would have benefited by not having only practice minded lawyers in those conversations. Would we have had less roadblocks by having people who were not all approaching the problems we wanted to solve with a mindset about their caseloads?

There is a clear benefit for having diversity in thinking and tasks in any room and we need to broaden our professional thinking to what that means.