Dr. Heidi Gardner of the Harvard Business and Law Schools joins the podcast to talk about about latest book Smarter Collaboration and the importance of collaboration in legal teams and in all organizations generally.

Smarter Collaboration is Dr. Gardner’s second book and a follow up to Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos. Both books are helpful to those in law because much of Dr. Gardner’s research is based on the many years she studied collaboration in professional service firms, including many law firms.

Why is collaboration across different disciplines and business units important? As Dr. Gardner explains, most importantly, it creates better client outcomes which improve revenues and profits. But collaboration doesn’t just help make clients happy and improve the bottom line, it also fosters diversity and reduces enterprise risk.

Dr. Gardner has cold hard data that supports her conclusions: Back in the 1970s, 60% of US patents were awarded to individual inventors. Nowadays, that numbers has reversed. The vast majority of patents are issued to teams and the more diverse the backgrounds of those teams, the more successful their innovation.