From the Georgetown Law Center: “Law Firm Evolution” – a video interview with Richard Susskind, author of “The End of Lawyers?”

Part of our coverage of “Law Firm Evolution:  Brave New World or Business As Usual?”, a conference held March 21-23, 2010 by the Georgetown Center for the Study of the Legal Profession.  For all our posts on the conference click here.

Reported by:  Gregory P Bufithis, Esq.    Founder,  ThePosseList.com/ProjectCounsel.com 

If only we had been listening to Richard Susskind these past 5 years.  He knew before all of us where we were headed.  It was in his 1996 book The Future of Law wherein he claimed that the law would be transformed by IT.  The book generated enormous interest and influenced public policy-makers and top managers in law firms around the globe.  Many of its predictions have already come to pass.   Our legal market melt-down merely accelerated the pace.    But we all know him best for his monumental book The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services  published in 2008 wherein he said there will be:

1.  an evolving and fluid spectrum of legal services categories: bespoke (one-off, customized or tailored), standardized (drawing upon precedents, process or previous work), systematized (reduced and applied to automated systems), packaged (systematized services exported to clients) and commoditized (packaged services so commonplace as to have little or no market value).

2.  deep and rapid technological advances (of the disruptive kind) which will lead to major threats to various aspects of the traditional law firm business model, those technologies being such as automated document assembly, relentless connectivity, the electronic legal marketplace, e-learning, online legal guidance, legal open-sourcing, etc.

3.   the “decomposition of legal tasks” into component parts that can be delegated to various sources (unbundling) such as in-sourcing, relocating, offshoring, outsourcing, subcontracting, etc.

And this is a mere sampling because we have not sufficient space to discuss the book’s full content.  These points (and more) were discussed  by Richard and others at the conference as well as the prospects of private equity buying stakes in law firms and legal service providers.

But did we speak enough about technology, the development having the most transformative effect on the legal industry?  Richard opines on this and other topics in my interview below: