We first met Richard Susskind in 2008 at the launch of his book The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services and then again in 2010 when he was the keynote speaker at the ABA TECHSHOW. We then had the chance of doing a video interview with him at Georgetown Law during Georgetown’s “Law Firm Evolution” conference.
His main points have always been :
1. Deep and rapid technological advances (of the disruptive kind) leading to major threats to various aspects of the traditional law firm business model
2. Relentless connectivity, and the burgeoning electronic legal marketplace
3. The “decomposition of legal tasks” into component parts that can be delegated to various sources: in-sourcing, relocating, offshoring, outsourcing, subcontracting
We had the chance to see him speak again last year at LawTech Camp London, a rather innovative event on law and technology run by Michigan State University which sponsors a new “law laboratory” called Reinvent Law to showcase innovation in the profession.
His latest book is now out in paperback, Tomorrow’s Lawyers, An Introduction to Your Future, released by his publisher Oxford University Press.
It is a good read. A good deal of the material in the early chapters is a restatement of much of what Susskind has written in earlier works, albeit with new examples. And he does look beyond technology driven change (for example he discusses the economic downturn as a driver of change). Some pundits, however, think he has not paid attention to the switch in international clout that arises from the rise of the China and many other emerging economies. He looks at the future for UK and US lawyers but will not their future be molded by expectations from very different cultures? But it has become harder and harder to disagree with the analysis: the pace of change has not slackened and you need only twirl around the Exhibit Hall of LegalTech in New York this week to see the giddy pace of the technology that produces all manner of legal analytics and aids law firms and in-house in the further decomposition of legal tasks.
And with Apple’s announcement yesterday of a new 128GB iPad … with larger iPads to come … and the amazing iPad e-discovery/analytics technology of such companies as Logikcull we expect in the not so distant future we’ll do everything on a tablet. It is no wonder legal technology is creeping more and more into the presentations and exhibit hall of the Mobile World Congress.
The Oxford University Press blog posted today a short essay by Susskind and he opens with a somewhat self-deprecating statement:
“The uncharitable might say that I write the same book every four years or so. Some critics certainly accuse me of having said the same thing for many years. I don’t disagree. Since the early 80s, my enduring interest has been in the ways in which technology can modernize and improve the work of the legal profession and the courts. My main underpinning conviction has indeed not changed: that legal work is document and information intensive, and that a whole host of information technologies can and should streamline and sometimes even overhaul traditional methods of practicing law and administering justice.”
But the essay … like the book … goes on to talk about enabling technologies, the legal world shifting from cottage industry to IT-enabled information sector, and neural networks.
It’s a nice read and you can access it by clicking here.
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