"There is No Place for the Computer in the Home"

Although this Hildebrandt article dates back to 2000, its premise that law firms of the future will migrate to the model of having full-fledged CEO's as business leaders strikes me as visionary then and almost palpably the direction in which the world is headed today.

This migration will be driven by the one irresistible outside force:  Clients.  How so?  I've repeatedly said that the biggest single complaint clients have is that lawyers don't really understand their business.  I'm beginning to believe this is a structural problem with the legal profession, and not merely a universally-repeated failure of training or diligence on behalf of lawyers.

By "structural" I mean that the qualities that make for the creme de la creme of the legal profession—extraordinary thoroughness, a focus on spotting all the issues, exhaustive research, a high degree of risk aversion, an utter inability to risk being wrong—are pretty much a short catalog of all the qualities a successful businessperson will not embody.  What then, would having a "CEO" at the head of a law firm do to fix this, or at least to paper it over attractively?

Primarily, it means that donning the mantel of CEO and living its mission permits, nay requires, one to learn business.  To stop "thinking like a lawyer" and to start thinking audaciously.  To truly be able to walk in your client's shoes.  And for those lawyers who reply, with marvelous internal inconsistency, that their firm will never have a CEO because: (a) they're not about to give up any control; and (b) having a CEO would make no difference anyway, the answer lies in the story of DEC and Ken Olsen, its CEO in 1977 who uttered the immortal words titling this post.  Where would DEC be today if he had envisioned a place for the computer in the home?  Two guys named Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were having precisely that thought.