Future of law

In the last Times extract from The End of Lawyers? Richard Susskind answers his critics. There are those that argue that “computers cannot replace legal work. Full stop.” and others who believe that IT will have no or minimal effect on lawyers. To which the reply is:

Open-minded lawyers, and those who genuinely care about the interests of their clients should, in the internet age, continually be looking at ways in which IT can play a more prominent role in their services. … there is remarkable scope for greater and beneficial deployment of technology. I also contend that for some lawyers there are existing and emerging technologies whose widespread adoption will effectively render them redundant. …“disruptive legal technologies” … do not support or complement current legal practices. They challenge and replace them, in whole or in part.

Most of the disruptive technologies that I identify … 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.

The end.

More on the future of law.

Richard Susskind takes a while to get to his point in the latest extract from his forthcoming book The End of Lawyers?:

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.

It’s clear that Web 2.0 offers ways to produce value and to conduct business more efficiently that were lacking in Web 1.0 which was used to automate the repetitive but not much more. When looking at the prospects for high-end work, “commoditisation” and even “systematisation” are probably not the key words on which to focus: law is a knowledge business, so instead think “collaboration” and “collective intelligence” to see where some of the new efficiencies will lie.

Another point I take away from the debate on the Times pages is that a number of commentators blithely ignore the telling question mark at the end of the title The End of Lawyers? 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 and misses the point; 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.

All Susskind 2.0 extracts digested.

Extracted from the third Times Online extract from The End of Lawyers?

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. …

If lawyers want to re-invent themselves and carve out new multi-disciplinary roles that allow them to deliver new value, then their commitment to these neighbouring areas of expertise must be deep and our law schools should be gearing up accordingly. In this way, we will also formally be equipping lawyers of the future with the tools and knowledge to solve business problems and not just legal problems.

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.

All Susskind 2.0 extracts digested.

In the second extract from his forthcoming book, The End of Lawyers?, published in Times Online, Richard Susskind revisits his predictions in 1996′s The Future of Law:

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. …

I believe now, and I believed then, that we are in a transitional phase between the print-based industrial society and the IT-based information society. Only when knowledge-based technologies allow us to manage more effectively these mountains of data we have created, will we be fully in the information society. …

I believe there is not just a latent legal market for the ordinary citizen but also for major organisations, too, when they find it difficult to secure legal guidance on all those occasions when they need it. …

I had in mind the notion that as citizens we should be able to find out easily and quickly what our legal entitlements are, and in so doing, we should be able to avoid legal disputes. …

I argued then that hyper-regulation means not that there is too much law by some objective standard, but that there is too much law given our current methods of managing it. Of course, I was creeping towards the suggestion that, with the coming of knowledge-based technologies, the volume of the law would be more easily managed with the assistance of our systems. …

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.

In fact it was somewhat more than ten tears ago. The Future of Law was published in early 1996 and was thus written in late 1995. That year is significant, for 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 in high school and facebooks were still published annually in hard covers. So it’s all the more remarkable for Susskind to have so accurately predicted the shape of the legal internet today (and of tomorrow – for, as he says, we are only half way through his 20-year view).

All Susskind 2.0 extracts digested.

Times Online publishes the first of several excerpts from Richard Susskind’s forthcoming book, The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the nature of legal services, due next May from OUP, from which:

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.

(cf Lawyers are necessary shock)

All Susskind 2.0 extracts digested.

In his SCL 2006 Lecture Richard Susskind predicted that the pace of development in the coming decade will be more profound than during the last. Emerging technologies would enable transformations in the nature of legal service, the way lawyers work, relationships between lawyers and their clients, legal training and learning and dispute resolution.

He sees an evolutionary path to the commoditisation of legal service, through standardisation and systemisation, fuelled by explosions in processing power. Lawyers’ methods of working and their working relationships will see major changes influenced by second-generation KM and by technology which encourages and requires greater collaboration and an appreciation of the importance of online communities. Wikis, blogs and webinars carry enormous potential for changing working methods – for example, a partner in charge of a major transaction might keep a daily limited-access blog and would thereby create a more powerful KM tool than could be contemplated by existing techniques.