100 years
Will lawyers exist in 100 years?
Technology and standardisation will make lawyers less important, Richard Susskind argues in his forthcoming book, The End of Lawyers? Over the next six weeks, in six exclusive draft extracts, he examines the radical changes ahead for legal services
It was a typical legal dinner. As the fine wine flowed, Richard Susskind cast his eye about the splendid wood-panelled main hall of the Mercers’ Company in the City of London. The mercers, traders in fine cloths and silks, had trained their last apprentice in 1888. Now, like many other ancient trades and crafts, from the tallow chandlers to the wheelwrights, they were mostly known for their livery companies. Could lawyers die out in the same way?
In a new book (to be published next year by Oxford University Press) Susskind argues that lawyers and the legal profession in their present shape face extinction – or at least are “on the brink of fundamental transformation”. He sees a future, as he puts it, when “conventional legal advisers will be much less prominent in society than today, and, in some walks of life, will have no visibility at all”.
The driving force towards the end of lawyers as we know them is twofold: information technology and what Susskind calls the market pull towards commoditisation – carving up a lawyer’s job into identifiable and discreet pieces that can be outsourced and done more cheaply by others. As a result, the jobs of many traditional lawyers will be substantially eroded and often eliminated.
This provocative conclusion is outlined in the first of six draft extracts from Susskind’s book, to be published weekly on Times Law online from today. The book, a sequel to his 1996 bestseller The Future of Law, is aimed at stimulating debate and, in a new venture, readers are invited to comment on each article. Those remarks will inform the final shape of the book and its conclusions.
Susskind says: “The challenge I lay down is for lawyers to ask themselves, with hands on hearts, what elements of their workload could be undertaken differently – more quickly, cheaply, efficiently or to a higher quality – using different methods of working.” In other words, what are the core indispensable legal skills lawyers have and what can be replaced by less costly workers supported by technology or by lay people armed with online self-help tools? The market, he argues, is increasingly unlikely to tolerate expensive lawyers doing jobs (guiding, advising, drafting, researching, problem-solving and more) that can be done better by “smart systems and processes”.
Conventionally, a book is written and published. Over time comments are made and a second edition results. But why, Susskind asks, not release the ideas and arguments earlier and incorporate responses into the book? Alex Spence, editor of Times Law Online, says: “The idea of this is to get lawyers thinking about what they do and how it will evolve. These are issues that the lawyers we talk to get very passionate about, so we’re hoping for a spirited debate.”
Alongside each week’s extract will be an interview with a leading legal figure: names include Richard Bennett, general counsel at HSBC, David Morley, managing partner at Allen & Overy, and Mark Chandler, general counsel at Cisco Systems in the US.
Susskind’s message builds on some of his earlier ideas in The Future of Law – such as his belief that lawyers are not “self-evidently entitled to profit from the law”: law is not there to provide a livelihood for lawyers any more than ill-health exists to provide a living for doctors.
A number of thoughts prompted the book. In recent years he has been struck, he says, about how lawyers have one thing in common: they seem to want to deny that they are lawyers – “they downplay the content of their jobs”. Rather, they are counsellors, confidantes, therapists, deal-makers, project managers and so on. That denial could be because to be a lawyer is “not the coolest of jobs” or a sign that the need for the Black Letter lawyer is waning and the job is undergoing fundamental change.
Yet against all the changes, he was struck by how few lawyers had thought about the future of the profession – despite the numbers, 15,000 annually, now coming to universities to read law. Almost no one, be they practitioners, academics, ministers or others, is articulating a vision of the future, he says. “No one seems to be worrying about the next generation of lawyers.”
A further stimulus for the book came from the Clementi reforms, the Legal Services Bill and the opportunities for business to have a stake in running law firms. Such people talk about call centres, outsourcing, online legal services, automatic document generation – another language from lawyers. Under businesses, the delivery of legal services will be very different.
So Susskind predicts that if lawyers do not embrace new ways of working, then in 100 years, or less, people may sit in comfort in a converted court-room, as they do now in some of London’s converted banks, and “appropriately nourished, speculate in a leisurely manner about solicitors and barristers... who were these people? What was their craft? Why do we no longer have them... and what brought about their end?”
(Published by Times Online, October 23, 2007)
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