I just read a fascinating book by Richard Susskind called Tomorrow’s Lawyers. It is so good that I bought copies for everyone in the Connecticut Bar Association leadership. Susskind is a lawyer from England, and has written for about the last 15 years of a dystopian future for law and lawyering. One of his earlier works was something called The End of Lawyers? Mercifully, Susskind now figures that lawyers, like other hard-shelled creatures, will survive the ravages of global social and economic change and emerge as players in the new, global economy. But he suggests, with more than a bit of credibility, that the life of tomorrow’s lawyer will not look at all like what those of us in the baby boom generation experienced.
One powerful force driving change is technology which has enabled us to move information around the globe at the speed of light. Not too long ago, if a lawyer wanted to work in another city, time zone or country she had to jump through many regulatory and physical hoops. Now, anyone with access to the Internet (a cohort which now includes even a large percentage of the homeless) can establish a virtual presence in any place that has electricity. That means that work is going to be sent wherever it can be done in the most time- and cost-efficient manner. He describes different ways that legal projects can be broken into small bits and then work on through such mechanisms as off-shoring, in-shoring, leasing, co-sourcing, crowd-sourcing, computerizing, de-lawyering and no-sourcing.
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