Change is about to shift into overdrive in law

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By Dan Heilman
Dolan Media Newswires

In 1996, Richard Susskind declared that someday, email would be the primary means of communications for legal professionals — a prediction that was greeted with scorn by attorneys and industry observers.

Now, when he talks, people listen. Susskind — an author, professor and advisor to firms and governments on legal issues — spoke to more than 300 people at William Mitchell College of Law recently on the kind of future lawyers and law firms will have to prepare for and adapt to.

The gist of his argument is that the 20th-century model of running a law business won’t work in the future, even if it seems to be working now — nor will an outmoded view of technology.

The three drivers of change going forward in the legal field, Susskind said, are liberalization of legal services, technology, and the ability of firms to offer a greater range of services for less money.

A key element of the latter trend will come in the form of collaboration and sometimes outsourcing of such project management services as document preparation and review.

“Clients don’t like to pay top rates to have a junior lawyer draft a routine contract,” Susskind said. “In the real world, it isn’t just about offering your knowledge, it’s about how you package it.”

Future legal matters will be “decomposed,” he said, or broken down into constituent elements and sourced wherever they fit best. Work such as document review, research and e-discovery can already be done by outside providers at a lower cost and with better results.

Finding ways to reduce the cost of low-level legal work will not only make clients happier but will also “radically increase access to justice,” he added.

Tech is king

Over the past 25 years, Susskind has written eight books examining the changing landscape of law. His latest, “Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future,” posits that legal institutions and lawyers will change more radically over the next two decades than they have over the last two centuries.

In an interview prior to his talk at William Mitchell, Susskind advised that he’s not a futurist or a social scientist, but rather someone who uses rigorous research to advise law firms and in-house legal departments on long-term strategy.

“In the case of law firms, I might interview their top 25 clients and try to understand the issues facing them,” he said. “I also work with governments, where the emphasis is on access to justice for everyday citizens. That work gives me access to their research on how disputes are resolved.”

Susskind said he wrote his latest book out of a sense of frustration that neither law schools nor students had any sense of the future of their industry.

In his talk, he said the main driver of that future, as it is with so many things, will be technology. Artificial intelligence, refined data mining and 3-D teleconferencing will be a staple of the business in a matter of years.

“It cannot be that IT is changing every corner of the economy but not law firms,” he said. “It’s nonsensical to think that you’ll work the same way in 2050 that you work now.”

By then, he said, the average laptop computer will have more processing power than the combined brains of every person in the world.

That will have unimaginable consequences in how legal services are performed and sold. Already, the technology exists to enable an ordinary citizen to describe a problem to a computer program and have the program offer an instant, feasible solution. That will be commonplace by 2040, and it could have a dramatic effect on the legal services industry.

“There’s no finishing line in IT,” he said. “We don’t know the technologies that will dominate our lives in 30 years.”

Asked if the adoption of technology in the law business has come at all close to keeping pace with the acceleration of new technologies, Susskind said so far it has not.

“I would say [law and technology] will someday go hand in hand before I’d say they have so far,” he said. “To this point, technology has mostly affected the back offices of law firms — word processing and online legal research.”

Before long, though, online dispute resolution, document assembly and legal advice systems will be the norm, with the main period of change coming over the next decade, he said. Moreover, the tech landscape will lead to an array of new jobs in law, such as legal process analyst, legal management consultant and online dispute resolution practitioner.

A liberal view

In England, where Susskind lives, the legal marketplace has been liberalized — non-lawyers are involved much more frequently in the delivery of legal services. He said that although liberalization offers clients greater choice, U.S. firms have tended to balk at the idea — in fact, the American Bar Association has come out explicitly against it.

Susskind insists that’s a mistake, and that a wider adoption of liberalization would bring a more entrepreneurial spirit to the delivery of legal services.

“I’ve been surprised at the level of enthusiasm from beyond the legal profession about being involved in that process,” he said.

The bottom line is that lawyers and the firms or companies they work for have to get ready to make some significant, fast changes if they hope to survive the coming decades.

“If you can think of different, more efficient ways of doing your work, there’s a good chance one of your competitors is doing it that way,” Susskind said.