Ontario in the Creative Age

The report by Richard Florida and Roger Martin, Ontario in the Creative Age, is available in PDF on the site of the Martin Prosperity Institute (… hate these tendentious names… ). I’m never very stirred — or shaken — by this sort of institute report, but this time there’s real merit in the thing, I think: rather than scrape the rust off the Victorian cogs and shafts, we should invest in what we now know will be tomorrow’s “normal” technology and skill sets. The report acknowledges the social upheaval that must accompany the shift away from routine labour to creative work and attempts to inspire us to face up to the challenge now, in a conscious — and creative — fashion, because the shift is underway whether we wish it or not.

Law and lawyers get scant mention in the report, perhaps understandably. But there are clearly challenges in our profession to elevate the quality of work most lawyers are required to perform on a daily basis and, to look at it from the other side, to elevate the quality of advice our clients get for their money.