Built-In Innovation: Spotlighting the Washington State Bar Association’s Innovation Team
Much ink is spilled over the legal profession’s reluctance to question the status quo and the barrier that poses to innovation. But another more practical barrier exists that receives less fanfare: capacity constraints. Even when leaders are enthusiastic about reform, someone, and often multiple people, must conduct research, coordinate stakeholders, draft policies, manage implementation, evaluate outcomes, and sustain the work over time. In many organizations, that work falls to volunteers or staff already stretched thin with day-to-day responsibilities. In the alternative, no innovation can occur without a new source of funding. As a result, innovation becomes episodic, reactive, or dependent on a handful of passionate individuals working beyond their existing workloads.
The Washington State Bar Association (WSBA) Executive Director Terra Nevitt, with strong support from the WSBA Board of Governors, decided to approach the problem differently. Rather than treating innovation as an extra responsibility layered onto existing roles, the organization built dedicated innovation capacity directly into its staffing structure.
The result is the WSBA Innovation Team—a cross-functional group designed to create the organizational capacity necessary to move ideas into implementation.
Today, the Innovation Team consists of several specialized positions embedded throughout the organization, including:
- A policy attorney focused on rule drafting and regulatory development
- A data analyst supporting evaluation and research efforts
- A project manager
- A community engagement specialist
These positions were chosen because they each reflect a critical component of successful innovation and are areas where the organization lacked capacity. New ideas often require changes to rules and policies, making legal and regulatory expertise essential. Innovation also requires data to identify problems, evaluate outcomes, and determine whether new approaches are achieving their intended goals. Project management helps move ideas from concept to implementation by coordinating timelines, resources, stakeholders, and competing priorities. Because meaningful change rarely happens in isolation, community engagement ensures that those affected by new initiatives have opportunities to provide input, build trust, and support successful adoption. Together, these roles provide much of the infrastructure needed to move innovation from idea to reality.
Now when a subject-matter expert within the bar comes up with an innovative idea, the Innovation Team is ready to help implement it. They are deployed to specific projects but also serve as internal consultants to the rest of the organization in their areas of specialty, allowing subject-matter experts to focus on the substance of the work without also needing to become experts in areas like evaluation or project management. Some members of the team are already working on the WSBA’s recent Entity Regulation Pilot Project, which allows entities with innovative business models, including those operated by individuals not licensed to practice law, to apply to offer legal services under time-bound, limited exemptions from existing rules. The team is also supporting the Licensure Pathways Implementation Steering Committee in exploring bar exam alternatives (IAALS also participates in the committee).
Like many organizations, the WSBA operates on a limited funding source (bar license fees) and must allocate its resources thoughtfully and responsibly. Importantly, funding for the Innovation Team is not tied to any particular innovation initiative, which can be time-bound and sometimes unpopular. The team was built over the course of two years, and funding came from a combination of post-pandemic cost-savings (less spending on events and office space) and incremental increases in license fees that mirror increases in labor costs.
The team has been fully operational for about a year and a half, and currently, there aren’t plans to expand it. The WSBA is leaning into the philosophy that created the team in the first place: rather than constantly trying to do more with less, try doing differently. Invest in innovation on the front-end. Don’t layer it on as “one more thing” on an already-full plate—build it in.
