Two really perceptive comments from Caroline Hill, Editor of Legal IT Insider, about the importance of doing good competitor analysis when presenting a solution and the powerful impact of video presentation.

I attended the London chapter of the Global Legal Hackathon 2019 at the end of February. It was the most amazing experience to be part of one of the teams competing in the first round at city or country level before all first round winners proceeded to the international semi final level.  Already looking forward to next year's event.

But Caroline is absolutely right to highlight the importance of doing the competitor analysis. It was something that particularly struck me at the time, when I was sitting in the audience listening to the other team presentations in London. The shinier the solution, the better the video, the more impact is made. This is absolutely to be commended and no one can take issue with this aspect of the new business and innovation process. However, paradoxically some of the most impactful presentations may eventually stumble at the first hurdle of testing and production stage if highly relevant questions regarding the product's unique place in the market go unanswered or even unasked by the judges, audience or other team members.

Of course, there is always a limited amount of time to cover everything, and human nature and participant excitement will naturally result in more time being allocated to the benefits of a new product or service, rather than the risks of competition or other entry barriers to market (such as high or low legal and regulatory hurdles to be jumped), but a good balance needs to be struck.

Having cautioned against overlooking the harder parts of business strategy, the positives must precede the negatives, and new ideas must always be encouraged to seed and germinate, and then they can always be refined, or even regrown, when the more difficult challenge of finding a unique position in the market, based on price or differentiation, arises for detailed analysis and scrutiny.

Caroline is also perceptive in her other observation about the importance of video presentation to complement and enhance the face-to-face and written components of any presentation.  Without suggesting that the best video performance may typically win the day and form will triumph over substance, clearly law firms and other legal services providers may wish to add to their presentation armoury capabilities by improving and increasing their video performance and usage. After all, if a "picture paints a thousand words", then surely a "video paints many thousand words"?