Capítulo 1
The Legal Revolution Awaits: Are You Ready?
Have you ever wondered why the legal profession seems frozen in time while technology transforms every other industry? Richard Susskind's "Tomorrow's Lawyers" isn't just another book about law-it's a wake-up call that has become required reading at Harvard Law School and is regularly cited by legal innovators worldwide. As a legal futurist whose predictions over 25 years have proven remarkably accurate, Susskind delivers a provocative thesis: the legal profession will transform more radically in the next two decades than it has in the past two centuries. While most lawyers seek comfort in continuity, Susskind envisions discontinuity-a fundamentally alien legal landscape where traditional models collapse and new opportunities emerge. For aspiring lawyers, the message is clear: prepare not for the legal market as it once was, but as it will be. As hockey legend Wayne Gretzky advised, "Skate where the puck's going, not where it's been."
Capítulo 2
Three Forces Reshaping the Legal World
The legal market stands at a crossroads, facing unprecedented flux that will fundamentally transform how lawyers work. Three powerful drivers are propelling this change: the "more-for-less" challenge, liberalization of legal services, and information technology.
The more-for-less challenge represents an existential crisis for traditional legal services. In-house legal departments face a seemingly impossible triangle of pressures: reducing headcount, cutting external legal spend (often by 30-50%), and handling more legal work than ever before. Small businesses routinely run legal risks without proper guidance because they simply can't afford lawyers. For individual citizens, dramatic decreases in public legal aid mean only the very rich or very poor can access legal services. This isn't a temporary economic blip-it's a permanent, structural shift in how legal services must be delivered.
Liberalization is dismantling long-standing monopolies in legal service delivery. The Legal Services Act 2007 in England and Wales pioneered this shift by permitting "alternative business structures" where non-lawyers can own legal businesses, external investment can enter the sector, and non-lawyers can become partners. This has unleashed remarkable entrepreneurship-firms seeking stock market listings, private equity investment in legal startups, and retail brands like the Co-operative entering legal services. While some major firms dismiss these changes as relevant only to high-volume work, liberalization will likely spread globally within a decade as clients demand similar innovations in their jurisdictions.
Perhaps most transformative is information technology's impact on legal services. With over 2.2 billion Internet users and cloud computing making information available as a utility, technology is creating a tidal wave that law firms can no longer avoid. Many lawyers dismiss technology as overhyped, fundamentally misunderstanding Moore's Law-the doubling of computing power every two years-which continues unabated. By 2020, desktop computers will match human brain processing power. Systems like IBM's Watson demonstrate how artificial intelligence will soon not just retrieve information but actually solve problems. The challenge for lawyers is to use technology not merely to automate existing processes but to innovate-practicing law in entirely new ways-even as these technologies disrupt traditional methods.
Together, these three drivers are forcing a fundamental rethinking of how legal services are delivered, creating both threats to traditional practices and opportunities for those willing to embrace change.
Capítulo 3
Beyond Hourly Billing: The Search for Sustainable Models
The three drivers of change are forcing law firm leaders worldwide to confront unprecedented threats and opportunities. With clients under relentless cost pressure, firms must develop compelling strategic responses to new market conditions.
Simply charging less seems an obvious response to the more-for-less challenge, but firms accustomed to decades of uninterrupted growth find this difficult. Many now offer "alternative fee arrangements" (AFAs) to replace hourly billing-a system that fundamentally rewards inefficiency. As my 12-year-old daughter astutely observed when offered an hourly wage: "Well, I'll take my time then." The traditional law firm pyramid model, with equity partners profiting from junior lawyers' billable hours (often 2,000-2,500 annually), has created substantial wealth for partners in major firms, with many earning over $1 million yearly.
Despite client demands for lower fees, alternative fee arrangements have largely failed to deliver significant savings. Most AFAs remain derived from hourly billing calculations, and firms rarely propose them with the intention of becoming less profitable. Without changing how they work, these arrangements merely repackage the original costly proposition. Research suggests competitive tendering and AFAs are delivering only about 10% cost reduction-far short of the 50% cuts many clients need.
Only two viable strategies can truly address the more-for-less challenge: the efficiency strategy and the collaboration strategy. The efficiency strategy isn't about cutting back-office costs but about reducing the cost of lawyering itself. Clients object to paying high rates for junior lawyers performing routine work that requires more process than judgment-document review, due diligence, basic drafting, and research. The opportunity lies in identifying work that can be routinized and performed more efficiently by less qualified personnel or through computerization.
The collaboration strategy, though more radical, suggests clients share the costs of certain legal services, such as regulatory compliance for major banks who collectively spend hundreds of millions on similar compliance requirements across multiple jurisdictions. Examples include banks sharing compliance costs through shared service centers and Allen & Overy's Rulefinder system, where six banks collaborated on a legal risk management tool.
What's becoming increasingly clear is that pricing differently isn't enough; lawyers must work differently to survive in tomorrow's legal landscape.
Capítulo 4
The Evolution Beyond Bespoke Services
Commoditization is central to both efficiency and collaboration strategies, yet many lawyers view it bleakly as work from which they can no longer profit. This perspective misses the evolutionary nature of legal services, which progress through five stages rather than existing in a simple bespoke/commoditized dichotomy.
The binary distinction between bespoke and commoditized legal work is fundamentally misleading. While lawyers often romanticize their work as uniquely tailored, most legal problems aren't truly unique. Clients would be horrified to think their lawyers start from scratch on each matter, especially when billing hourly. The notion that legal work is entirely bespoke is often an unhelpful fiction that maintains inefficient cottage-industry methods when more efficient approaches are available.
In reality, legal services evolve through five distinct stages: bespoke, standardized, systematized, packaged, and commoditized. Most practitioners already use standardization through templates and checklists. Systematization takes this further with workflow systems and automated document assembly. Packaging occurs when lawyers make their expertise available online under licensing arrangements, allowing clients to access services without direct lawyer time. Finally, commoditization happens when legal work becomes freely or cheaply available online.
As services move along this spectrum, costs decrease, pricing becomes more certain, completion times shorten, and quality often improves as collective expertise outperforms individual effort. Though many lawyers resist this evolution, it represents a crucial path to meeting clients' more-for-less challenge while increasing access to justice.
Consider document assembly systems, which generate customized document drafts by asking users questions and producing in minutes what traditionally took hours to craft. From simple wills in the 1980s to complex loan documentation today, this technology disrupts time-based billing models. Services like LegalZoom, which has served over two million customers, provide legal document templates to those who can't afford traditional lawyers.
This evolution isn't about diminishing legal expertise but about delivering it more efficiently and accessibly. The most successful lawyers of tomorrow will be those who understand which parts of their work genuinely require bespoke attention and which can be standardized or systematized without sacrificing quality.
Capítulo 5
Decomposing and Multi-Sourcing Legal Work
The legal market faces not only the more-for-less challenge but also the reality that legal work can be decomposed and sourced in entirely new ways, challenging fundamental assumptions about how legal services must be delivered.
Legal engagements aren't monolithic tasks that must be handled in one way. Instead, they can be decomposed into constituent parts, with each handled in the most efficient manner possible without sacrificing quality. Despite resistance from practitioners who claim their specialty is unique, even complex litigation can be broken down into discrete tasks. When litigation is decomposed into nine components (document review, legal research, project management, litigation support, disclosure, strategy, tactics, negotiation, and advocacy), top litigators typically acknowledge they're uniquely qualified for only two or three elements (strategy, tactics, and sometimes advocacy).
The remaining tasks can be handled by alternative providers at lower cost and often higher quality. Document review, traditionally done by junior lawyers at high hourly rates, can be outsourced for one-seventh the cost. Similarly, project management requires specialized training and expertise that most lawyers lack, despite their confidence in handling it after minimal training.
When confronted with legal work, clients traditionally had simple choices: handle it internally or send it to a law firm. Now, at least 15 alternative sourcing options exist: in-sourcing, de-lawyering (using paralegals), relocating, off-shoring, outsourcing, subcontracting, co-sourcing (through shared services), near-shoring, leasing (engaging lawyers for limited periods), home-sourcing, open-sourcing, crowd-sourcing, computerizing, solo-sourcing (engaging individual specialists), and no-sourcing (choosing not to undertake certain legal tasks).
The future lies in multi-sourcing-decomposing matters into tasks and identifying the most efficient sourcing method for each. This approach resembles manufacturing methodology, using just-in-time logistics and global supply chain techniques to deliver mass customization rather than mass production, creating tailored solutions through standard processes and systems.
Consider document review in major litigation. Traditionally, armies of junior lawyers would review millions of documents at high hourly rates. Today, specialized legal process outsourcers can perform this work at a fraction of the cost, often with greater accuracy through technology-assisted review. The key insight is that different components of legal work require different expertise levels and can be sourced accordingly.
This decomposition approach doesn't diminish the value of true legal expertise-it enhances it by allowing senior lawyers to focus on the elements where their judgment truly adds value, while more routine elements are handled more efficiently.
Capítulo 6
Disruptive Technologies Transforming Legal Practice
Disruptive technologies fundamentally challenge and change how businesses operate, unlike sustaining technologies that merely enhance existing processes. Even market leaders can be unseated by disruptive technologies (like Kodak's downfall from digital cameras), especially when they dismiss new systems as superficial until it's too late.
At least 13 disruptive technologies are transforming the legal landscape, creating havoc for traditional providers but often benefiting legal service buyers. These technologies collectively reshape how legal services are delivered and accessed:
Automated document assembly systems generate customized document drafts by asking users questions, producing in minutes what traditionally took hours to craft. From simple wills in the 1980s to complex loan documentation today, this technology disrupts time-based billing models.
Relentless connectivity through handheld devices, tablets, wireless broadband, video conferencing, instant messaging, social networking, and email prevents lawyers from disengaging from work. With increasing processing power and storage capacity, lawyers' "presence" is constantly visible to their network, and clients expect immediate access.
The electronic legal marketplace includes online reputation systems where clients share views on their lawyers' performance, price comparison websites displaying rates of different legal advisers, and online legal auctions similar to eBay for routine legal work. These technologies disrupt lawyers who previously relied on client ignorance about alternatives.
E-learning facilities supporting legal learning and training are making remarkable progress, extending beyond online lectures to simulated legal practice and virtual learning environments. For law firms, e-learning transforms training from "just-in-case" classroom teaching to "just-in-time" interactive multimedia tools.
Online legal guidance systems provide legal information, guidance, and advice across the Internet. Examples include LawHelp in the US for low-income people and Probate Wizard for self-service probate in England and Wales. The threat to conventional lawyers is clear: if clients can secure guidance and documents online at low cost, this directly competes with traditional advisory services.
Legal open-sourcing involves online mass collaboration to build public, community-oriented legal materials like standard documents and checklists. It's another form of commoditization disrupting lawyers because legal content once chargeable becomes freely available.
Closed legal communities are restricted groups of like-minded lawyers collaborating online in private social networks. Legal OnRamp is a prime example, connecting in-house counsel, invited outside lawyers, and service providers from over 40 countries.
Workflow and project management systems function as automated checklists driving standard processes for high-volume, repetitive legal work, representing new efficiencies that challenge firms charging hourly and profiting from inefficient case management.
Perhaps most revolutionary is the emergence of AI-based problem-solving. If IBM's Watson can beat human champions at Jeopardy!, AI-based legal problem-solving isn't far away. This could involve online services containing vast legal materials that understand problems spoken in natural language, analyze fact patterns, draw conclusions, offer advice, and express guidance in computer-simulated voice.
These technologies aren't merely theoretical-many are already deployed and gaining traction. The question isn't whether they'll transform legal practice, but how quickly and dramatically they'll do so.
Capítulo 7
The Changing Face of Law Firms
The central question emerging from these trends is how lawyers' work can be done differently-more quickly, cheaply, and efficiently, yet with higher quality. Most traditional practices aren't changing much despite cost pressures from clients, new service providers, and emerging technologies. This resistance stems from change management challenges, structural issues with the traditional pyramidic model, and reluctance to believe change is necessary.
Law firms will be driven relentlessly by clients to reduce costs, eventually leading to alternative sourcing strategies and the end of leverage. The traditional pyramid with partners at the top and junior lawyers at the base will narrow significantly. Some firms may strip away junior lawyers, operating with high-powered partners each supported by one associate, with routine work resourced externally. Others might build internal alternative sourcing capacities like paralegal teams or off-shored facilities.
A global elite of law firms (around 20 today, likely to merge into fewer) may feel immune to change, arguing that for bet-the-ranch matters, clients still want traditional service delivery. They'll claim only a handful of brands will be tolerated at board level, and when an organization's future is at stake, legal work isn't price sensitive. However, if one leading firm breaks rank or a major new force emerges with a credible brand at half the price, this could fundamentally change the market.
Recently appointed partners are increasingly anxious about their firms' futures, asking critical questions about sustainability. Unlike the dismissive attitude of junior partners a decade ago, today's new partners eagerly seek guidance. The changes predicted aren't immediate but will take hold within 3-6 years. For many firms, their peak profitability was around 2006, and unless they change radically, those glory years have passed.
Most junior partners are inheriting outdated, low-tech businesses that will soon not be fit for purpose. Unfortunately, many senior partners, with only a few years left before retirement, focus on short-term profitability rather than long-term strategic health, failing to provide the leadership needed for major reinvention.
Innovative firms like Clearspire, radiant.law and Riverview Law have abandoned traditional business models, rejecting pyramidic profit structures, hourly billing, and expensive offices. By keeping overheads low, encouraging remote work, using flexible resourcing, leveraging technology, outsourcing back-office functions, and employing paralegals, they remain profitable while charging clients less.
The legal market is likely to experience what Susskind calls an "incremental revolution" unfolding in three stages: denial, re-sourcing, and disruption. In the denial stage (still ongoing as of 2012), most lawyers yearn for the pre-2007 era when work was plentiful and price sensitivity minimal. In the re-sourcing stage, legal work will be analyzed to identify routine activities that can be sourced differently. In the disruption stage, powerful information technologies will displace traditional legal work methods entirely.
Capítulo 8
New Career Paths for Tomorrow's Lawyers
In the future, conventional lawyers will be less prominent as clients resist paying for work that can be done by less expert people with smart systems. This doesn't signal the end of lawyers but points to fewer traditional roles and exciting new opportunities for those flexible enough to adapt.
When work cannot be standardized or computerized, clients will still need "expert trusted advisers"-intelligent, creative lawyers who can devise solutions for complex, high-value legal challenges and communicate guidance in a highly tailored, personalized way. Many lawyers claim they already do this, but clients disagree.
The "enhanced practitioner" will be skilled but not deeply expert, using modern standardization and computerization techniques. Often acting as legal assistant to expert trusted advisers, they'll handle tasks requiring legal knowledge but not costly specialization.
As legal services become standardized and computerized, talented lawyers will organize and model complex legal materials and processes as "legal knowledge engineers." They'll analyze, distill, and capture law as standard practices and computer systems. This work is intellectually demanding-creating systems to solve many problems is more challenging than finding answers to specific issues.
With legal practice now dependent on technology, we need "legal technologists" bridging law and IT. Previously, we had mainstream technologists in legal environments and lawyers with computer interests. Neither group consisted of professional legal technologists trained in both law and systems engineering.
Future lawyers must diversify by becoming multidisciplinary "legal hybrids." Many already claim expertise in neighboring disciplines-acting as strategists, consultants, or psychologists-but often with minimal training. Tomorrow's legal hybrids will be formidably schooled in related disciplines, adding considerable value to their legal services.
Decomposing legal work into constituent tasks and identifying appropriate service providers requires deep legal insight. This role-the "legal process analyst"-isn't for business analysts but for experienced legal professionals who can identify efficient and effective ways to handle legal work.
Once legal work is decomposed, the "legal project manager" takes over, allocating tasks to appropriate providers, ensuring timely completion within budget, controlling quality, and integrating various work packages into seamless client service. Legal project management will evolve its own methodologies, becoming a core subject in future legal education.
As online dispute resolution becomes common, "ODR practitioners" will emerge to advise clients on these electronic systems. These practitioners will develop expertise in e-negotiation and e-mediation, creating techniques that give clients advantages when using these platforms.
In-house legal departments face numerous management challenges but often lack management experience. "Legal management consultants" will provide strategy consulting (long-term planning, sourcing, organizational structure) and operational consulting (recruitment, panel management, financial control).
General Counsel primarily focus on legal risk management, preferring problem prevention over resolution. "Legal risk managers" will work proactively, anticipating needs rather than merely responding to questions. They'll conduct risk reviews, litigation readiness assessments, and compliance audits.
These new legal roles offer intellectually stimulating and socially significant careers for tomorrow's lawyers willing to expand their skills beyond traditional practice areas.
Capítulo 9
The New Legal Employers
Skeptics may doubt whether traditional legal businesses will create these new roles. Indeed, many of these positions will likely emerge from new types of legal businesses enabled by liberalization and driven by recognition that many legal tasks no longer require traditional lawyers.
The "Big 4" accounting firms are poised to re-enter the legal market significantly. Their previous attempt, exemplified by Andersen Legal with 2,500 lawyers across 30 countries, ended not from strategic failure but from Andersen's collapse following the Enron scandal. Seeing opportunity in the legal market's flux, they may position themselves as alternative providers specializing in legal process outsourcing, risk management, and computerization.
Commercial giants like Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier have evolved from print publishers to providers of massive legal databases and diversified into legal technology and online services. While unlikely to offer conventional advisory services, they will provide many of the new legal roles described previously.
Companies like Practical Law Company (PLC) represent nimble, entrepreneurial employers for tomorrow's lawyers. With over 200 lawyers, PLC provides legal research, market intelligence, standard documents, and practice notes to law firms and in-house departments. As decomposition and multi-sourcing increase, these providers will expand their services and workforce.
Legal process outsourcers (LPOs) have grown from ambitious start-ups into sophisticated service providers handling increasingly complex work beyond routine tasks. As liberalization continues, they'll position themselves to offer services previously exclusive to law firms.
Banks and retail businesses entering the legal market as alternative business structures will deliver standardized, computerized legal services from convenient High Street locations. While competing directly with traditional small firms on price, these businesses will still need lawyers with considerable legal experience to develop and deliver their services.
Legal leasing agencies like Axiom provide flexible career paths for lawyers who prefer alternatives to conventional law firms or in-house departments. They maintain pools of temporary lawyers available for project-based work, appealing to clients because they cost about half as much as traditional firms.
Online legal service providers offering advice, document production, and dispute resolution systems present natural opportunities for lawyers interested in careers as legal knowledge engineers. These businesses pre-package legal insight for clients to access without direct lawyer consultation.
For the next five to ten years, law graduates should still try to secure positions in conventional law firms or in-house departments to complete their training and qualify. However, those unable to do so will find many alternative legal businesses interested in engaging them.
Capítulo 10
Preparing for a Transformed Legal Landscape
The legal profession stands at a pivotal moment requiring fundamental rethinking of both legal education and training. Law schools worldwide face criticism for producing far more graduates than the legal market can absorb, with statistics showing a significant gap between graduate numbers and available positions. Beyond concerns about overselling and student debt, the more fundamental issue is whether law schools are adequately preparing students for tomorrow's legal marketplace.
The fundamental question is whether we're training lawyers to be traditional one-to-one, solo, bespoke advisers specializing in black-letter law and charging by the hour, or preparing them for the future as flexible, team-based hybrid professionals who transcend legal boundaries, speak business language, and leverage modern management and technology. Current legal education overwhelmingly emphasizes the former while neglecting the latter-we're training 20th-century lawyers rather than 21st-century legal professionals.
Young lawyers traditionally learned their trade by handling routine legal work, but this model faces challenges as such work is increasingly outsourced or automated. Clients no longer want to pay for training junior lawyers through high hourly rates for process-based work. This creates a fundamental training problem that law firms must address to remain competitive.
Future legal training should be built on three foundations. First, return to an apprenticeship model where young lawyers work closely with experienced practitioners, sharing rooms or working in open-plan areas to observe best practices firsthand. Second, when work is externally sourced, young lawyers might undertake samples in parallel-both for learning and quality control-with firms bearing the cost. Finally, firms should leverage e-learning and virtual legal environments.
Today's senior lawyers were educated before personal computers, spending countless hours memorizing cases in dusty libraries. Traditional lectures should be replaced by online lectures from inspirational speakers. Even more promising is simulation-based training like Paul Maharg's at Strathclyde University, where students practice in virtual law firms in "Ardcalloch," a fictional town where they engage in simulated transactions with experienced solicitors acting as clients and judges.
When evaluating potential employers, tomorrow's lawyers should ask probing questions: Do you have a long-term strategy? What will legal service look like in 2035? Are you comforted by other firms' lack of progress? What are your preferred approaches to alternative sourcing? What role will IT play in law firms of the future? Do you have a research and development capability? If you could design a law firm from scratch, what would it be like?
The changes anticipated for lawyers and justice administration will be pervasive, irreversible, and transformational. By 2035, mid-career for today's young lawyers, the legal profession will have changed beyond recognition. The legal paradigm is shifting from a one-to-one, consultative, print-based advisory service to a one-to-many, packaged, Internet-based information service.
Tomorrow's lawyers must become benevolent custodians, honestly identifying areas that genuinely require lawyers while embracing alternative service delivery where appropriate. The law exists not to provide lawyers with livelihoods but to serve society's needs. The future of legal services isn't predetermined-it's waiting to be invented. Unlike previous generations, tomorrow's lawyers have an unprecedented opportunity to shape the next generation of legal services. The responsibility falls to the new generation to forge new paths for our most important social institution.
