My Desert Lawyers

The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services

Description

The End of Lawyers? is the much-anticipated sequel to Richard Susskind's legal best-seller of 1996, The Future of Law. Ten years on, and half-way towards the twenty-year vision he set out, Susskind takes stock of progress, introduces vital new emerging technologies, and envisages even more radical change to the legal world than before.

This is a world in which, at least in part, legal services are commoditized, IT renders conventional legal advice redundant, clients and lawyers are collaborators under the one virtual roof, disputes are dominated by technology if not avoided in the first place, and online systems and services compete with lawyers in providing access to the law and to justice. For the conservative legal adviser, the message is bleak. For the progressive lawyer, an exciting new legal market emerges.

This book continues the author's focus on the effect of advances in information technology upon the law and legal practice, providing fresh perspectives and analysis of anticipated developments in the decade to come. In particular, he aims to explore the extent to which the role of the traditional lawyer can be sustained, in the face of the challenging trends in the legal marketplace and the new techniques and technologies for the delivery of legal services.

Reviews

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-08-07
Summary: "Good historical summary; Mild and miscellaneous predictions"

Richard Susskind is an established author of books about technology and the legal profession. This book is very well-written by someone who has reduced the complexities of technology down to management principles and concepts. However, rather than making bold predictions about where the nature of legal services is heading, the bulk of this book revisits the historical impact of internet, e-mail, client relationship management ("CRM") on the legal profession and then, half-heartedly, provides a few examples of current trends, while hedging that these trends may or may not fizzle-out. Nevertheless, this approach makes perfect sense when you reflect on his historical analysis. Thus far, the investment in the nexus between technology and legal services has been trial and error; some concepts have worked and others were expensive misallocations of resources.

Take-away points:

* The paperless office is coming, but enthusiasts similar to Susskind have been saying that for years. How much printing did you do last week?
* Client relationship management ("CRM") software is essential for nearly everyone practicing law, whether local or cloud-based.
* Similar to the way many of us now use TurboTax Online, increasingly, motivated individuals will be able to exercise legal self-help using internet resources (e.g. [...], [...], and even [...]). However, don't expect all potential clients to be so motivated. People will still need lawyers.

In conclusion, if you are a young associate or law-student techie that is trying to figure out what to expect from the next ten years of practice, this is a must-read. It will quickly bring you up to speed as to what the decision-makers in many firms have been dealing with over the last few decades and why they will not be so eager as this generation to hand over their lives and their firms to Clio, RocketMatter, Google, and Facebook.

More information at: [...]

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-07-23
Summary: "Excellent"

This book has really made me think about where my practice is now, and what it might look like in 10 or 20 years. Having seen Susskind in person hasn't hurt my evaluation of this either.

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-02-19
Summary: "The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services"

The experience base underlying my comments are as a recovering attorney who has served as a practice development consultant to law firms around the United States. These comments are primarily directed to those who are invested in, depending on your point of view, the legal industry or profession.

First the good news. Before reading Susskind's work, you'll need three packs of sticky notes in different colors. Use one color to mark the things that you already agree with, another for the things you disagree with and the third - the big pack - for the new ideas you hadn't considered before. Since tradition is only helpful to the extent the future will be like the past, it is not so much in his specific predictions that Susskind's work benefits the legal community as much as the fact that he makes the velocity of change undeniable.

The metaphorical image of lawyers Susskind paints is a bunch of guys in `bespoke' suites, standing on a beach toward which a huge wave is approaching, arguing with each other who will bear legal liability for the tsunami. Those who value the profession and their role in it will heed the warning and move to the high ground. These will be those who recognize that the legal profession is the servant of society - not the repository of its order or wisdom.

In `minding the gap' between consultant speak and difference between theory and practice, the footnotes alone - most of which are web sites exemplifying what he's discussing, are worth the price of the book. The author would have earned more money from this work if he had simply asked the readers to send him a dollar every time they looked followed up on a footnote and said to themselves `now I see what he's talking about'.

The bad news is that the author's experience clearly focuses this book on the net sum of his professional experience, which, apparently, is serving the largest `white shoe' firms in Great Britain. Since, using economic terminology, the law is a `lagging phenomena' - this exacerbates the differences in `legal culture' between us. The significance of this is inversely proportional to the `listening skills' of the reader. To the extent that most lawyers spend the time they're not talking thinking up what they're going to say next - this is a problem.

Overall, the book gets a thumbs up. The author does American lawyers the favor of not only saying that changes are coming but outlines some specifics as to what those changes might be. Getting to higher ground in time is up to each individual and firm.

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2009-07-22
Summary: "Looks forward to a new world"

Please note the question mark in the title.

Susskind, a British information-technology consultant and futurist, is not necessarily predicting the end of the legal profession in this thought-provoking but overly long and convoluted book. He is predicting that within a couple of decades, lawyering will have changed in ways that the typical law firm partner of 2009 can hardly envision.

The engine of change, as far as Susskind is concerned, is the Internet and information technology in general. Susskind points to 10 "disruptive technologies" - among them ideas as prosaic as automated document assembly and as visionary as the provision of legal advice through open-source technology - that will alter the face of the profession.

"Information technology is now part of the universe of lawyers," Susskind writes. "It is not a parallel universe. Disruptive legal technologies are too important to be left to technologists ... they are applications of technology that challenge the old ways and, in so doing, bring great cost savings and new imaginative ways of managing risk."

Susskind believes, for example, that except for the most customized, top-of-the-line engagements, legal work done by top firms in the United States and the United Kingdom will soon be largely standardized through the use of intelligent document assembly programs, the deployment of more paralegals and nonlawyers, and other innovations. Even high-end corporate work, he says, can benefit from standardization. The result will be lower costs to clients, a broader availability of legal services to the public, and possibly the end of the big law firm as we know it today.

Susskind is quite aware of the cutting edge of legal marketing. One of his "disruptive" techniques is "the electronic legal marketplace," which he sees as including online ratings of individual lawyers, online auctions, bulk purchasing, and readily available price comparisons. He foresees the multi-sourcing of legal services, increased confidence by clients that they are getting the best value for their money, greater choice, and of course lower costs.

The book can be slow going (Susskind has not learned how to write in short paragraphs), it can be repetitious, and Susskind's examples are taken almost entirely from British life, law, and experience and will be quite foreign to the American reader. For example, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, a government agency that Susskind regards as a key player in the legal Internet, sounds merely quaint to American ears.
Regardless, anyone who wishes to understand where the profession has been and where it is going should read this book.

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2009-07-04
Summary: "A welcome addition to the conversation..."

A provocative title which amounts to a call to arms or more accurately a call to reflect and learn from what is changing and challenging everyone else's business model. If you have read his earlier offerings the themes are familiar but more compelling. The promise/threats/opportunities presented by ICT are now capable of presenting a much more fundamental threat to the way we practice and the underlying assumptions upon which the legal 'business model' is built. Equally clearly the threat ICT represents presents just as much of an opportunity if the incumbents are prepared to embrace them and understand the other changes transforming the market for legal services.
I suggest reading this in conjunction with Christensen's 'The Innovator's Solution' Harvard Business School Press in order to appreciate how such threats have and can be utilised to advantage.