In May The New Yorker ran an enlightening profile of Clayton Christensen, the influential Harvard Business School professor. He became famous for a book called The Innovator’s Dilemma, which among other things warns successful companies to beware of new competitors who enter their markets with low-end, low-profit products that eventually disrupt their commercial space. His ideas have floated around the big-firm world for yearsI first heard about them from a guy who was convinced that his online auction site was the end of The Am Law 200 as we knew it.
Now, thanks to a confluence of factors, another player has entered the market, one that fits Christensen’s model in a way that will make law firm managers extremely uncomfortable. It’s Axiom, the onetime temp agency that has started doing legal work directly for corporate clients. Axiom’s operations [see "Disruptive Innovation"] carry the possibility for significant change in the market because there is almost no endshort of, say, being first chair in a courtroomto the work that Axiom can threaten to take away from law firms.
