Unprecedented: Designing a Human-Centered Law Firm When Everything Is Changing

By: Leonard, Jennifer

Unprecedented: Designing a Human-Centered Law Firm When Everything Is Changing explores how law firms can reinvent themselves amid seismic shifts in the legal industry. Themes are illustrated through the experience of a fictional law firm, as it conducts a week long retreat designed to confront disruptive forces such as generative AI, client power shifts, hybrid work, and outdated economic models. The story reveals the messy human realities of change: fear, resistance, hope, and the courage to design something better. Along the way, readers gain insight into design thinking, change management, lawyer development, client centric service delivery, and alternative pricing-presented not as abstract theory but as lived experience inside a firm fighting for its future.

The story reads like a page-turner, but chapters are also filled with practical tools such as reflection questions, frameworks, agendas, and exercises, giving readers a model they can adapt to their own organizations. The result is an engaging, accessible blueprint for law firm leaders, legal innovators, academics, and other legal professionals who want to shape the next era of practice rather than be shaped by it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1402450060
• ISBN13: 9781402450068
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Practising Law Institute
• Length: 350 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"