Future of law

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Is the law a can of beans? (reprise)

16 October 2009 in Future of law

Way back in 1999 I wrote a piece on the commoditisation of legal services which still resonates today.

Some lawyers are still arguing that there are so many potential pitfalls in using commoditised online services that the customer should always seek legal advice. For example, Angela Davis of Nottingham law firm Berryman warns that DIY divorce websites could be a false economy (PDF): “In my view, there is no substitute for obtaining good quality legal advice, tailor-made to each individual’s particular requirements.”

At the same time we have Susskind urging law firms to decompose their work and see which parts can’t be done more efficiently using technology. Though he focusses on BigLaw, his entreaty needs to be taken on board by firms of all sizes doing all types of work. It’s fact that standard wills, standard conveyances, standard divorces and many more upmarket legal processes are being delivered more efficiently with commoditised services. The argument is not whether or not these standard processes should be commoditised and sold, it is about how those commoditised processes are sold and how lawyers can best sell them together with their related (and often necessary) bespoke services.

It’s all very well to say that customers should always seek legal advice, but they will be attracted by the cheap and easy option which they find at the top of their Google results. If they are to be aware of the potential pitfalls in using some of those services without legal advice, short of more regulation, it’s up to lawyers to innovate and package and sell their services more effectively.

The end of BigLawyers – does the rest of society care?

14 October 2009 in Future of law | 2 comments

Having just penned my previous post on BigLaw, I browsed the latest issue of Legal Information Management and was riveted not by my own article therein :=), nor by any of the many other worthy articles, but by the Book Review at the end in which solicitor Gillian Bull rather comprehensively disses Susskind’s The End of Lawyers?

Her main beef is that the arena of legal services from which Susskind draws most of his examples is BigLaw: “Susskind’s book in the main deals with life on Planet Mammon: life on Planet Rumpole (or even Planet Pooter) doesn’t figure much.” Thus, in her view, the book is not relevant to most lawyers and the public at large. Not only that, but City lawyers either won’t need to read it if they’re already on the game, or won’t want to read it if they’re not; and their ICT managers will “need more than the collection of anecdotes and predictions that this book comprises. To make their case for spending money they need lots of hard data, of which there are none here.”

Not content with trashing the book, Gillian puts Susskind down for liberally referring to committees and reports in which he was a participant and to himself generally – and not much to others.

So is all this criticism fair? I too was disappointed that there was disproportionate coverage of and emphasis on BigLaw. It is only in Chapter 7 on Access to Justice that he refers to the types of legal services offered by the majority of lawyers and experienced by the majority of businesses and the general public. But I found myself easily able to read between the lines and to relate the arguments to other types of practice. High Street conveyancing and will writing first kicked off the inevitable evolution of legal services from bespoke to commoditised and it is not difficult to see with Susskind’s help how other mainstream legal services are following. Should he have drawn on examples from these other mid- and lower-market services and explained how they will be affected according to his thesis? Yes, I think so, but that does not make the book irrelevant to those unconcerned with BigLaw issues.

As to the frequent references to himself and his own activities and the paucity of references to others, again Gillian has a point, though that did not stand out to me when I read the book. We cannot expect Susskind not to draw on his own experiences, but we could again expect a bit more balance by reference to the work of others.

Judging from its Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank of 16,304, a lot of people have bought this book; far more than bought books of related interest (selected from “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”):

  • The Law Machine (Paperback) (2000) by Marcel Berlins 19,125
  • Law Firm Strategy: Competitive Advantage and Valuation (Hardcover) (2007) by Stephen Mayson 250,703
  • The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies (Paperback) (2008) by Kennedy and Mighell 839,256

Big sales do not make this a good book, but they do mean that many people have read it and I’m sure most have benefited and at least taken something away about the future of legal services that they did not have before.

As Gillian says, “There is a book yet to be written concerning the impact of IT … on both lawyers and the public at large. Unfortunately, this book is not it.” But we did not expect that from this book. We expected Susskind to extend and expand on his earlier work, and this he has done in his own way. Someone else will write that other book.

Unfortunately, the review is not publicly available. To read it you need to subscribe to LIM or buy the issue. Maybe the publishers or the author would make an exception for these few hundred words which, refreshingly, do more than praise the book or deny its arguments relate to them.

Reformation

11 February 2009 in Future of law | 2 comments

Deep thought (as ever) from Jordan Furlong at Law21 on the future of lawyers a la Susskind. He concludes:

If we take another meaning of “end” – an outcome worked toward or an objective for which effort is expended, rather than the more popular meaning of “disappearance” – then we could say that this is a book about where lawyers are going, and what use will be made of them when they get there. In that sense, the book warns, if the profession stubbornly ignores or resists these clear changes to the surrounding environment, then the end of lawyers could be, indeed, the end of lawyers.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, and it’s not what Richard Susskind is rooting for. He sees a radically transformed legal profession at the end of this process, and clearly hopes that this new profession can and will provide smarter, earlier and more effective legal guidance to a much broader range of clients. That’s an end of lawyers we should all be pulling for.

Meanwhile energetic new blawger and social networker Neil Denny speaks for the enlightened solicitor:

The choice is simple and it is ours. We either engage with the debate and make a contribution, or we will get left behind. What is clear though is that the drive to changes nothing short of reformation is already well advanced. The momentum and size of the vehicle is massive and it will not be stopped.

The future of lawyers

5 January 2009 in Articles, Future of law

First published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, January 2009.

In The End of Lawyers? (Oxford University Press) Richard Susskind challenges the legal profession to ask what elements of their current work could be undertaken more quickly, more cheaply, more efficiently or to a higher quality using new methods.

He makes his case firstly by mapping the path that almost all legal services will inevitably follow: from bespoke to standardised to systematised to packaged to commoditised.

He argues that the majority of lawyers have little appetite for the journey towards the right and any movement in that direction is frequently regarded by lawyers as generically offensive. But clients are attracted to the right, competitors may break rank and drive in that direction and (with the implementation of the Legal Services Act) alternative forms of legal business are likely to start trading some way along the path.

He concedes that, because of the nature of legal work, there will always be be a place for bespoke work, but the demand and justification for it will diminish over time and lawyers who wish to remain in the bespoke camp must continually innovate and generate new bespoke offerings. The scope for differentiation in legal services lies in creating such new bespoke work and in developing systems and packages ahead of the competition.

To respond effectively lawyers must “decompose” their work: look at each task in turn and honestly assess the optimum way of executing each. The resulting legal service will have its origins in numerous sources, each chosen for its suitability and efficiency, and combined in a seamless solution. He refers to this as “multi-sourcing” (deploying everything from in-sourcing, through outsourcing in all its manifestations, home-sourcing and open-sourcing to computerising; and even “non-sourcing” where the risk of doing nothing is negligible).

Susskind also calls for law firms to overhaul their practices and align their interests with those of their clients: to put themselves in their clients’ shoes. Fundamental to this is the abandonment of hourly billing which motivates firms to spend more rather than less time on work where clients want precisely the contrary. Put crudely it rewards the inefficient and penalises the well-run legal business whose sytems and processes enable it to conclude matters rapidly.

Much of the analysis centres on the work of the top 100 firms who advise the top 1,000 businesses. The arguments are not limited to them, but for the most part, the smaller firm will need to read between the lines in the early chapters and move on to Chapter 7. Barristers can take some comfort from the fact that most of their activity is highly bespoke; but of concern to them should be that firms are likely to build their own bespoke capacity at their expense.

In Chapter 7 on Access to Law and Justice, Susskind directly addresses the needs of “citizens, individuals, voters, consumers, regular people”, who are ill-served by the status quo, and the fate of law firms who serve citizens, who will be as deeply affected by the arguments in the preceding chapters as their commercial cousins.

Susskind sees improved access to justice being achieved with the following building blocks:

  • the empowered citizen – using the web to recognise when they have a legal problem, select an appropriate service provider and obtain service
  • streamlined law firms – who have decomposed their work and multi-sourced as described above
  • a healthy third sector
  • entrepreneurial alternative providers – who will find new and improved ways of delivering conventional legal services (encouraged, particularly, by the Legal Services Act)
  • accessible legal information systems, and
  • enlightened public information policy

(cue FreeLegalWeb).

Does all this spell the end of lawyers? For many, it does look to Susskind as if the party may soon be over. Certainly there will be no place for inefficient lawyers in the legal service of the future; but there will be opportunities for the expert, the efficient and the innovative, including:

  • the expert trusted adviser – who delivers genuinely bespoke advice
  • the enhanced practitioner – whose skills are deployed in delivering standardised, systematised and packaged services
  • the legal knowledge engineer – who develops these services
  • the legal risk manager
  • the “legal hybrid” or multi-disciplinary practitioner

There is little to criticise in the way Susskind writes and one would be foolish to question his undoubted experience and expertise. My only quibble is that the book feels too far weighted to the concerns of large law firms and in-house counsel. Although such work reputedly accounts for at least 40 per cent of all law firm revenues, according to Law Society statistics for 2007, firms with over 25 partners represent only 1.9 per cent of law firms by number and only 40 per cent of solicitors by number. The average small- to medium-sized firm is as much in need of his counsel as the mega firm and could have been better engaged in the early chapters.

Most of the criticism of Susskind’s arguments comes from those who have digested only snippets; certainly they have not not read him in sufficient depth. With few exceptions, they seek to distinguish their work from that of the lawyers under threat whom Susskind describes and consequently to argue they they are somehow immune to the the forces that will drive them either to further efficiencies or to extinction. It is not doomsday stuff. It is simply a case of recognising that legal practices are businesses; more than that, they are knowledge businesses. Such businesses, more than most, are subject to relentless pressures as the information economy develops. They cannot rely on past privilege for their survival; it is adapt or die.

If you doubt that, I suggest you do the following. 1) Ask yourself how you conducted your practice in 1995. Did you foresee how your work practices would (have to) change with the development of email and the web? 2) Look over your childrens’ shoulders to see how they conduct their business. 20 years or so from now, they will be running the show. Will they do so as inefficiently as you?

Comment

2009

31 December 2008 in Future of law, Outsourcing

I usually leave it until the last minute to frame my “binary law” predictions for the year ahead. After all, a lot can happen in a month and it’s of course helpful to have the benefit of everyone else’s predictions first!

In the SCL IT & law predictions for 2009 (batch 1, batch 2, batch 3) Charles Christian and others see that in these straightened times one of the prime areas for cost cutting will be IT: firms will delay upgrades and expenditure on new systems where these won’t show immediate financial benefit and will increasingly look to outsourcing their IT requirements via SaaS and cloud computing services.

But we won’t get out of this hole simply by cutting IT costs and substituting outsourced services. As Linda Webster, Head of IT at Wedlake Bell, says, forward-thinking firms who see themselves as businesses and IT as a critical component of all our daily lives will be looking closely at every area of their businesses from how clients are attracted and retained to the methods in which work is produced and will be using this as an opportunity to deploy systems in imaginative ways.

This echoes the ever-prescient Richard Susskind‘s entreaty (penned before the current recession had taken hold) that to respond effectively lawyers should “decompose” their work: look at each task in turn and honestly assess the optimum way of executing each. The resulting legal service will have its origins in numerous sources, each chosen for its suitability and efficiency, and combined in a seamless solution. He refers to this as “multi-sourcing” (deploying everything from in-sourcing, through outsourcing in all its manifestations, home-sourcing and open-sourcing to computerising; and even “non-sourcing” where the risk of doing nothing is negligible). The prospective protracted recession renders it more urgent that firms conduct such a review immediately.

It’s a certainty that this process will gain pace and 10 years hence we will have a very different legal services landscape; less clear is how far along the path we will be in one year’s time or what significant developments will have taken hold by then.

If the last year has taught us anything it is that we have to think long term. We’re in this mess largely because of short-termism. So I will leave you with no predictions for the year ahead. Focussing on 2009 will not help any of us; we need to put on the long lenses to see what we need to do to make a difference in the next year.

There is hope.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

30 December 2008 in Future of law | 1 comment

I recently commented far too favourably on the the new Law Society Gazette site. There is no way to browse the archives which is frustrating. But to give the site some juice, the opinion sections in particular should be inviting our comments.

I’d have liked, for example, to respond to Clive Wismayer, Solicitor, Great Bookham, who recently penned a Letter to the Editor, from which:

I was interested in Joshua Rozenberg’s article on the doom-laden prognoses of Richard Susskind, who apparently believes that, in future, ‘bespoke’ legal services will be the exception.

With great respect, what utter tosh. …

… legal advice of any quality at all cannot and never will be susceptible [to] standardisation to the required degree.

I for one will not be buying Susskind’s book …

Now, I’m sure Clive is not a Luddite, but he is woefully ill-informed and is certainly in denial. As Susskind says of such naysayers:

Politely, it puzzles me profoundly that lawyers who know little about current and future technologies can be so confident about their inapplicability.

Read the book, Clive.

What about clients?

12 December 2008 in Future of law

In a series of recent posts, Jordan Furlong gives his slant on the arguments at the heart of Richard Susskind’s thesis:

Decoupling price from cost in legal services:

In order to turn a profit, firms will be forced to streamline their costs of production, whatever they might be.

The market doesn’t care

clients don’t care if you make money … You have no right to make money from every problem or opportunity clients face.

The new leverage

This is the future of legal work, configured not to be an end in itself (a profit center for lawyers) but as a means to an end (better service for clients).

Now, don’t hastily jump on Jordan or Richard, or me for that matter; we’re only messengers.

And this reminds me, it’s a while since I perused WAC?

The future of lawyers

10 December 2008 in Future of law | 2 comments

I have not yet found on the public access web anything approaching a review of Richard Susskind’s The End of Lawyers? (Oxford University Press). So I must conclude I’m one of the few who have actually read it from cover to cover. To say I’ve read it is a bit of an exaggeration; I confess that several sections I have only skim-read; there is a lot of detail which certainly needs digesting but which can safely be left to a second reading.

Read on …

A wake-up call to lawyers

14 July 2008 in Articles, Future of law

Professor Richard Susskind is, as I write, no doubt completing the final draft of his forthcoming treatise, The End of Lawyers? to be published in June by Oxford University Press.

More than 12 years ago he wrote its predecessor, The Future of Law. Then only a few of us had awoken to the internet; only a handful of firms had websites; there was no free law to speak of and no e-commerce; Google’s founders were still students and facebooks were still published annually in hard covers. Yet he then predicted remarkably accurately the shape of the legal internet of today.

In six extracts published recently in Times Online he gives us a taste of his updated thinking and asks us to help him finish the new book!

  • He challenges lawyers to embrace change.
  • He revisits some of the predictions he made in The Future of Law.
  • He argues that lawyers will give way to multi-disciplinary advisers.
  • He says that clients will not remain loyal to conventional practices.
  • He asks who is looking beyond the next five years.
  • He addresses his critics and says they have missed the point.

Here are extracts from the extracts. The headings are mine, with apologies to the author.

Face up to it

“The law is not there to provide a livelihood for lawyers any more than ill-health exists to offer a living for doctors. Successful legal business may be a by-product of law in society, but it is not the purpose of law. And, just as numerous other industries and sectors are having to adapt to broader change, so too should lawyers. —

The challenge is not to assess how commoditisation and IT might threaten the current work of lawyers, so that the traditional ways can be protected and change avoided. It is to find and embrace better, quicker, less costly, more convenient and publicly valued ways of working.”

No, I am not dangerous or insane

“I argued that many of our fundamental assumptions about the nature of legal service and the nature of legal process would be challenged by the coming of information technology and the internet. In other words, much that we had always taken for granted in the past, about the way that lawyers work and the way non-lawyers receive legal guidance, would change through technology. —

When I suggested ten years ago that e-mail would become the principal means by which clients and lawyers would communicate, many people suggested I was dangerous, that I was probably insane and that I certainly did not understand anything about security or confidentiality.”

The e-volution is upon us

“Lawyers, like the rest of humanity, face the threat of ‘disintermediation’ (broadly, being cut out of some supply chain) by smart systems; and, as in other sectors, if they want to survive, their focus should be on re-intermediating – that is, on finding news ways of invaluably inserting themselves in supply chains. This will lead, I believe, to the emergence of what I call ‘legal hybrids’: individuals of multi-disciplinary background, whose training in law will have evolved and dovetail with a formal education in one or more other disciplines. —

I am not suggesting that there will be no call for the traditional legal expert. I am saying there will be less call for these individuals, because new ways of satisfying legal demand will evolve and old inefficiencies will be eliminated.”

Your clients will vote with their wallets

“The major firms may feel they are beyond the scope of commoditisation and systematisation and that, on bet-the-ranch deals and disputes the legal fees represent but pocket change in the grand scheme. But this is not the attitude I find amongst the general counsel of some of the world’s largest organisations.

These managers are under pressure to reduce their legal budget. And these clients’ loyalty to conventional firms will be limited if new legal businesses emerge that offer quicker, more convenient, lower cost alternatives to low- and high-value work that seem to be more geared to the interests of clients and are more business-like in their constitution.”

Think of your children

“No-one who might be thought to be in the driving seat of the legal system is thinking systematically, rigorously and in a sustained way about the long term future of legal service. No-one seems to be worrying about the fate of the next generation of lawyers.

It is assumed that legal guidance will continue to be dispensed by skilled professionals as a one-to-one, consultative advisory service. By and large, no discontinuities, transformations, upheavals, disruptions or revolutions in the nature of legal service are being contemplated.”

Wake up!

“Open-minded lawyers, and those who genuinely care about the interests of their clients should be looking at ways in which IT can play a more prominent role in their services. there are existing and emerging technologies whose widespread adoption will effectively render [some lawyers] redundant. ‘disruptive legal technologies’ [will] challenge and replace them, in whole or in part.

Most are phenomena of which most practising lawyers are only dimly aware. If lawyers are barely conversant with today’s technologies, they have even less sense of how much progress in legal technology is likely in the coming 10 years. Politely, it puzzles me profoundly that lawyers who know little about current and future technologies can be so confident about their inapplicability.”

Comments anyone?

In keeping with the times, Times Online elicited online comments from readers to each of the articles. These served the purpose of not only engaging the readership, but also providing feedback to assist Susskind in completing his work.

A number of commentators ignore the telling question mark at the end of the title The End of Lawyers? and the sub-title rethinking the nature of legal services. Even the Times itself is guilty, asking “Will lawyers still exist in 100 years?” If lawyers are those who do legal work, then the answer is “Of course they will”. But that is not the question; the question is rather “What shape will lawyers be in?” Reliance on the fact that there will always be lawyers will not help those lawyers who fail to adapt to the changing landscape.

Others point out that there will always be high-end/complex legal work that cannot be commoditised, but here again, this is a rather narrow interpretation of Susskind’s point. “Commoditisation” and even “systematisation” may imply automation of the repetitive but not necessarily much more. But law is a knowledge business and when looking at the prospects for lawyering, including high-end work, think also “collaboration” and “collective intelligence” and other words which are to the fore in the current Web 2.0 world to see where some of the new efficiencies will lie.

There is also more substantial comment in the blogosphere and in the legal press, which you can find readily by Googling “the end of lawyers” susskind.

As to the immediate future, Susskind counsels (in his contribution to the SCL 2008 predictions):

“My advice to lawyers and law firms everywhere is to take Web 2.0 very seriously indeed in 2008. We are entering a new era of Internet activity, one that will directly affect the daily working lives of legal practitioners. The impact on the legal profession of social networking and online collaboration will be profound. I am more confident about this than I was, in 1996, when I said that the Internet would transform the communication habits (e-mail) and information-seeking habits (the Web) of lawyers. In 2008, we will see the beginnings of the legal world embracing Web 2.0.”

Web 1.0 facilitated the delivery of information and transactions between producers and consumers and set the ball rolling; Web 2.0 is transforming the medium into one that challenges the traditional roles. Susskind argues lawyers should see the writing on the wall: the acquisition, processing and application of legal know-how is no longer the preserve of (traditional) lawyers.

The death of the high street practice?

4 March 2008 in Future of law | 3 comments

John Bolch on Family Lore relates the sad tale of local (Kent) firms who are shedding staff by the dozen due to the property slump. And following their conveyancing business may well be their whole business. Anecdotal evidence is that HIPs are as much to blame as the sub-prime crisis.

Who agrees? Who disagrees? Who cares? We don’t know, as there are no active conveyancer blawgers. The only one I know of, Wearyconveyancer, is so weary that he can manage a post only every couple of months and so disillusioned that he is seeking to retire before the HIPs shit the fan.

In search of conveyancing blawgers I searched with Google blog search for conveyancing HIPs solicitors and was excited to find Digital Conveyancing Users Group by Brett Hayton, a property and conveyancing lawyer. Interesting, but unfortunately Australian, so not wholly in tune – if not upside-down.

Another prominent result was from News on the Block – latest news, opinion, comment and debate on flats, tenant legislation and landlord law from Nicolas Shulman. So, not on topic.

No conveyancer blawgers, but what was interesting was to find a few law firm news blogs ranking high in the search results:

Daltons Solicitors News Blog
Hart Reade Solicitors Latest News
Ranson Houghton News

Commendable if unexciting “blogs”, but going to show it’s worth blogging your news just for the Google juice.

Back to the question: Why no conveyancer blawgers? If you blog mainly or prominently on matters conveyancing, or have a view on the impact of the conveyancing slump on the profession, comment here or on John’s blog. We want to know.

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