Lucia Elizalde, Lawyer and Behavioural Scientist at Elizalde Consulting, has more than 25 years of experience in law firms and in-house teams, including as a litigator and in-house general counsel. She then spent eight or nine years as an innovation leader at a large American law firm. There she concluded that human behaviour makes or breaks innovation, retrained as a behavioural scientist and founded a behavioural innovation unit. She now runs an independent practice applying behavioural science to the business of law.

Overview

Law firms and in-house teams have invested heavily in buying and onboarding technology, yet Elizalde argued that return on investment cannot be judged by looking at tools alone. What matters is how people behave in relation to them. Any AI rollout, firm strategy or leadership programme depends on others doing new things, stopping old ones or changing habits, so it needs a behavioural change layer. She also sees change increasingly coming from below, as enough people working differently can push leadership towards real transformation.

Behavioural science studies why people act as they do and changes behaviour through tested interventions. Because behaviour is highly contextual, generic frameworks fail; practitioners must also understand the pressures of legal work. Elizalde sees culture as the sum of behaviours, and behaviours must be concrete. A collaborative culture means partners actually sharing client contacts for cross-selling, not endorsing a vision. Sometimes the target is stopping something: client feedback forms sent by marketing teams work poorly, whereas clients tend to welcome being asked directly by their partner. She likened behaviour to a spring, where starting close to people’s current defaults makes progress more likely than radical change from the outset.

The practical difficulty is the gap between intention and behaviour. Staff asked whether they will use a new tool will say yes, because that is what they think you want to hear. Elizalde therefore advocates observation as the baseline: for one project she sat for a year with twelve to fifteen lawyers alongside the technology development team, recording how they worked so the tool reflected what they did rather than what they said. She acknowledged that lawyers, who like to talk, find this unfamiliar. She framed the approach as a way for lawyers to reclaim agency over technology, and noted that later sessions will explore specific methods in more depth.

Key Takeaways

• Add a behavioural layer to every change initiative. Technology, strategy or training plans on paper do not deliver results unless people actually behave differently.
• Define behaviours precisely. Replace aspirations such as “better business development” with observable actions, including things people should stop doing.
• Judge people by what they do, not what they say. Survey answers and stated intentions are unreliable, so observe real work to set a baseline before designing change.
• Start close to current habits. Gradual movement from existing defaults is more likely to succeed than a sudden overhaul, and bolder change can follow later.
• Look beyond top-down mandates. Groups of people working differently can influence leadership, so engage teams as well as management.
• Use behaviour science to reclaim agency over technology. Asking how tools benefit people, clients and the organisation supports better decisions than treating technology as something that simply happens to the profession.