From Georgetown Law: Concluding Remarks at “Law Firm Evolution” conference

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 and ProjectCounsel.com  

David B. Wilkins (Lester Kissel Professor of Law and Director, Program on the Legal Profession, Harvard Law School) provided some closing remarks to the conference.  First, a brief note on David:

David has written extensively on the legal profession in leading scholarly journals and the popular press and is the co-author (along with his Harvard Law School colleague Andrew Kaufman) of one of the leading casebooks in the field.  His current scholarly projects on the profession include After the JD, a ten-year nationwide longitudinal study of lawyers’ careers, the Harvard Law School Career Study, a quantitative and qualitative examination of how corporations purchase legal services, an empirical project on the development of “ethical infrastructure” in large law firms based on a series of focus groups with leading practitioners and regulators, an examination of the practice of “offshoring” legal work to India, and over 200 in-depth interviews in connection with a forthcoming Oxford University Press book on the development of the black corporate bar.

He is also one of seven Harvard Law School faculty members who will teach the school’s new required course for all first-year students entitled Problem Solving. 

In his concluding remarks at the conference he focused on the large structural changes, one of the biggest being globalization.  As David stated “lawyers should look for where money changes hands and that is increasingly moving east”.  But more important (and immediate) is the rise of information technology because that is simply re-making every element and aspect of the world beyond law and that change will continue to accelerate.

Another large structural change:  the disintegration of the “primitive nineteenth century idea we have that there are distinct fields such as law, accounting, and business”.  As David phrased it “all knowledge is multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary. 

All of these changes will impact/have impacted the legal profession with one of the biggest changes being that legal services are now “disaggregated and unbundled and being re-packaged and re-located”.   This means that the basis of our competition will shift from “our reputation and credentials to what results we can achieve and what value we bring to our clients”.   We will see a “networking effect” where the barriers between firms and clients will go down and we will see “virtual teams and no-boundry work” which will all be client driven. 

The challenges for large law firms?  Firms will need to embrace “the commodification curve” and learn that commodified work can be very profitable.   The shift towards commercialism has introduced external market forces to an industry long insulated from them.  But if mobilized properly, the consumers of legal services can use their new market power to address some of the most critical problems facing the elite firms.

David also sees the creation of a common culture in a global and networked legal economy with people acting to take advantage of their best opportunities.  Law firms must manage the “paradox of professional distinctiveness”  and  replicate the practices of other successful global businesses.