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

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

In The End of Lawyers? Susskind explores and extrapolates trends in information technology and attempts to visualize and present how these trends may affect lawyers. After all, lawyers at a basic level sell access to information, and computers hugely change how information is accessed and distributed/sold.

The title, with its inclusion of "end" is meant to be provocative. Lawyers tend to be somewhat mired in the past and resistant to change. I'm a lawyer, and there is resistance to changes in the way legal services are prepared and sold. There is a view that legal services are somehow different and special.

The first four chapters (The Beginning of the End?, The Path to Commoditization, Trends in Technology, and Disruptive Legal Technologies) lay out how information technology has affected other fields which were similarly resistant to change, and how provision of legal services has already changed in responce to new developments in computers. Susskind breaks down different aspects of legal services and discusses potential for changes in the way these are provided. For example, rote drafting is easy to picture as being done by computers. Even in a system where the lawyer physically types out each standard contract or pleading, that lawyer is probably using a form book and a form book translates directly into a cut and paste computerized form. However, even complicated anaylsis can be done differently. For example, medical diagnosis by computer can be done by having the patient answer yes or no to a series of questions. This works well even for complex conditions. Susskind discusses a program designed to do the same in commodities law and the reaction of an expert in the field (the computer program did as well as he and sometimes better, which surprised him but not that much).

The next four chapters (The Future for In-house Lawyers, Resolving and Avoiding Disputes, Access to Law and to Justice, The Future of Lawyers) look indepth at different roles lawyers play and for each role try to extrapolate changes that might occur in that role. The entire book is laced with examples, and footnotes are likely to point to websites or firms which already provide the types of service which Susskind thinks we will see more of. These chapters moreso. This isn't all theoretical. I particularly liked the discussion of court systems and the ways some of them have automated different aspects of the court in order to deal with heavy case loads. Some many examples discussed here, like electronic filing and docket searches are newer changes which now feel normal. I spent my last semester in law school clerking part time at an administrative court in which judges are located a 6 hour drive from the district in which their cases are tried. This is accomplished through telephonic and video hearings. That's a huge change that came in within the last 10 years, but now it's normal. I think the extent to which the clerks of courts have adapted to new technologies and the extent to which they haven't is more obvious to lawyers in the field, since this is a system which eventually gets interacted with by everyone but is removed from most lawyers' daily lives.

I highly recommend this book to people in the legal field or knowledge management. It is well worth hunting down or ordering a copy. This was a fascinating, and because of that quick, read. The examples provide a good resource for where we've been, and the predictions are well thought and and provocative glimpses of where we might go.

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

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

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.

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