In the coming decade, I believe legal practice will be transformed by two related phenomena – commoditisation and online community.

The common understanding of commoditisation recognises that some legal services are becoming highly routine. They are no longer commanding serious fees, becoming demystified and commonplace. And so, they become commodities of sorts.

I have recently analysed this idea in greater depth and concluded that commoditisation is better seen as the fifth and final step in the evolution of legal service, as depicted below.

Travelling along this evolutionary path, highly tailored, bespoke legal service gives way to standardisation when legal work becomes recurrent. In turn, standard ways of working are systematised through IT. The resultant systems can then be made directly available to clients in the form of packages and, when these become widely available and indistinguishable, they evolve into commodities.

However, work on any given matter for a client will rarely map directly onto just one of the five steps. Instead, on particular disputes or deals, work will tend to be spread across a number of the steps. The central issue for any matter is this: what is the optimum balance or distribution of tasks and activities across the five steps?

For most legal services, I contend there is a growing pull by clients to the right towards commoditisation. This is largely for commercial reasons because service towards the right tends to be offered on a fixed-fee basis and most clients welcome this certainty. Also, clients rightly expect cost savings as service becomes standardised, systematised and more.

Regarding online community, innumerable internet trends, techniques and systems (such as wikis, instant messaging, open source, YouTube and MySpace) are pointing in the same direction – towards a world where online collaboration and sharing is pervasive.

What kinds of legal communities will emerge? Vitally, there will be communities of clients. Legal departments will coalesce electronically into groups that use their collective purchasing power to secure better legal services at lower costs.

Clients will even come to share the advice they receive with fellow members of their communities. Legal advice will be recycled among clients, whereas recycling today is confined to the reuse of materials within individual firms (aka knowledge management). Large collections of advice will build up, not simply in arid libraries but interleaved with online commentary and discussion.

Client communities will also encourage law firms to come together and form their own communities, as the Banking Legal Technology Group has done in London – in 2003, nine investment banks asked five major firms to collaborate in providing a single knowledge portal for these clients.

Meanwhile, individual clients will establish virtual legal functions, made up of the law firms in their panels and their own legal departments. Lawyers from different firms will work as closely alongside one another as part of these communities as they do with their own colleagues.

These online communities, like commoditisation, present profound challenges for conventional legal businesses. Imaginative firms will embrace the opportunities they present, while the rest will wither.

Richard Susskind is an author, speaker and independent adviser to professional firms and national governments.