During the last decade, countless predictions were made about the coming age of innovation in the legal industry, but there was only marginal, incremental change. As Danish physicist Neil Bohrs once said, "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."

Something no one predicted is that it would take a global pandemic to finally usher in an era of actual innovation—that is, implementing change, not merely talking about it. Law firms have been forced to change more in the past six weeks than in the previous 10 years combined. Innovation has always been one of those loose, difficult-to-define words, but now we're getting a taste of what it really means. Nothing awakens necessity more than a crisis.

Law firms are now beginning to look beyond the urgency and immediacy of the onset of this crisis, and trying to assess what comes next. It seems all but certain that any hope of a "V-shaped" recovery, ushering in a swift return to the "old normal," is wishful thinking. We are moving past the beginning but are nowhere near the end. We are in a liminal space, which is a transitional time between what was and what is next.