The End of Lawyers?
posted by Helen Norton
Or so says British lawyer and technology constultant Richard Susskind, whose new book “The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services” is summarized by globeandmail.com as follows:
“In Mr. Susskind’s vision of the future, small law firms that dispense customized legal advice will be pushed out of business by technology-savvy and more nimble firms that dispense run-of-the-mill advice and legal documents through websites. Larger law firms will evolve into commercial enterprises with vast stables of legal, accounting and other experts geared to preventing and managing clients’ legal risks. These big firms will outsource basic legal services to cheaper quasi-legal experts and they will build retail kiosks or websites that allow clients to download regulatory expertise and draft legal documents any hour of the day.”
Seems this is already happening, at least in the U.S.
(hat tip to Laura Spitz)
February 19, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Posted in: Uncategorized
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Responses (2)
A.J. Sutter - February 19, 2009 at 10:14 pm
Thanks for the link. Though I was amused by the lead-in to the article, “When Richard Susskind predicted in 1996 that lawyers would soon send most legal advice and documents through e-mail …” — Great “prediction,” since the firm I was working at was already doing that in the early 1990s. Also interesting that “nimble”, a favorite word in the vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, is here used in connection with big firms, not, as usual, small ones.
These predictions are nothing new, and while they may come to fruition in part, they also have some limitations. I remember a thread from a lawyers’ bulletin board on CompuServe in 1994, where some lawyer in Minneapolis was trying to persuade me that there was no reason for motion picture entertainment lawyers to cluster in L.A., thanks to the Internet. Clients would be able to find lawyers at lower rates, since guys like him had lower overhead. Similarly, in the late 1990s, people were predicting huge trading markets for IP. None of those happened.
For some aspects of business, face-to-face will always matter. Some of that is cultural — here in Japan it takes many meetings, and sometimes years of acquainance, before people start to do business with each other; and the movie business is very schmooze- and favor-oriented. Some of it is practical — email-only negotiations of major deals are very difficult, and it’s pretty difficult (or should be) to learn the best way to pratice an invention solely from a patent document. And some of it is prudent — “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog,” as the cartoon says. There are some lawyers on this blog or others whom I respect a great deal, and with whom I’ve been having electronic conversations for a year or more, but I wouldn’t hire any of them without meeting them first.
Susskind’s prediction may come true for certain kinds of services, in cases where there is a pre-existing relationship (e.g., Linklaters sound like they have a clients-only service). The examples cited in the article — downloading financial term sheets, employment contracts and other standard documents — are nothing new. I’ve drafted plenty of form documents for clients that they can re-use in repetitive transactions; the only difference is that I emailed them, instead of having clients download them from a URL. But of course, I drafted the agreement only after consultation with the client, so I could incorporate provisions, alternatives and instructions suitable for that client’s needs. That’s different from allowing the client to choose from a menu of fully genericized offerings (which is not necessarily what Susskind is predicting). Professional responsibility issues might put the brakes on that development: who’s liable if you let a client draft his/her/its own document from your generic template, and something gets screwed up?
As for the multiple layers of out-sourcing, I expect there may eventually be some backlash against it. Think of the moral hazard issues arising from subprime loan intermediation, and what those have wrought. We may yet see other issues springing up from the disembodiment of services that we can’t now even imagine.
A.W. - February 20, 2009 at 9:12 am
Mmm, the bar associations, aka the “Societies for the Full Employment of Legal Professionals” will strangle this in its crib if it goes too far.
And personally I am skeptical of the idea of legal forms taking over, or form information. That has been possible since the invention of the printing press and it hasn’t happened. Why now? Why think the internet makes it magically possible?
I am struck by the way that every legal problem has unique features making it unlikely that we can ever go 100% form based.
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