Richard Susskind has been forecasting the death of today's legal services model for years. Monica Bay asks if the future has finally caught up with him

For more than a decade, futurist Richard Susskind has been preaching that the end is near. At vendor product launches and conferences, he has predicted that the generations-old model for the delivery of legal services will fail. Clients, he insists, will increasingly demand transparency and better, faster and much, much cheaper legal services. He argues that the profession must reframe its delivery systems to identify which work product is "bespoke".

Generals of the revolution

Susskind's latest travel itinerary included a five-city 'Generals of the Revolution' tour. On 29 September in New York he set out his agenda to about 100 attendees.

"How do we find ways to provide more services at less cost?" he asked, before suggesting that the answer involves two strategies: efficiency and collaboration. General counsel, he said, "don't mind paying high rates for expert lawyers, but are concerned about high rates for junior lawyers who are doing repetitive work," citing the long-time hot-button gripe of the GC crowd.

The time is ripe for counsel to find opportunities to share costs, he urged, especially on non-competitive projects. Addressing ways that firms can provide better, faster, cheaper legal services, Susskind offered a range of options, including checklists, practice guides, process management, substantive law templates and adopting technology tools to improve document creation and assembly as well as workflow.

Identifying work that can be done as fixed-fee projects can also reduce costs, increase profits and improve transparency for clients, Susskind said.

A more controversial issue is outsourcing, either by offshoring or "near-shoring" to less expensive venues. But these tactics are saving significant amounts of money for clients willing to adopt them.

Contract lawyers

Susskind cited the emergence of organisations such as Voxius and Axiom that are developing "pools of contract lawyers who can go in-house and work for a specific period of time, for about 50% of the cost" of an employee lawyer. In a move that may seem a bit akin to eating your young, Berwin Leighton Paisner has launched a Lawyers on Demand unit within the firm to help its corporate clients in need of short-term legal teams.

Susskind alerted the audience to watch for "disruptive technologies" that can change an industry irrevocably, such as digital photography. He predicted that online dispute resolution will prosper as another self-help vehicle, citing the success of eBay's system, which resolved 60 million disputes last year. And auctions for legal services may become more commonplace, Susskind reminded the GC audience.

Deja vu

Susskind (pictured) is not without his critics and sceptics. Curmudgeons whisper that his keynotes generate a strong sense of deja vu; that his speeches, and even his jokes and PowerPoint slides, haven't changed over the years. But enthusiasts say the hard, cold reality is that we need Susskind to keep spreading the gospel because so many lawyers have turned a deaf ear and are only now getting the message thanks to the brutal reality of the economy.

Susskind's countryman, Charles Christian, who publishes the Legal Technology Insider and The Orange Rag blog, has known Susskind for about 20 years.

"I think his problem in the past – and why his views have been dismissed out of hand by the legal establishment – is that they were a little too far ahead of the time," says Christian. "Today we are seeing more of a nexus between legal market trends and his business models. Yes, he does use the same jokes – but his message is consistent, which adds to his credibility. He doesn't hop on each new bandwagon to limp into town – and there has definitely been an evolution in his views over time."

And there is no doubt that Susskind has the credentials. He's a professor at the University of Strathclyde; law columnist at The Times, IT adviser to the UK judiciary, and so on. His seven books include The Future Of Law (1996), The Future of Law (2000), and The End of Lawyers? (2008).

Like a seasoned politician, Susskind is a pro at the soundbite, and is at his best when the cameras are rolling, expertly framing talking points no matter the question. UK-based Susskind can even appear at your conference via "pre-recorded video or DVD," he advises on his website.

Timing is everything

Susskind has been talking about all this change for a long time. But will it ever actually arrive? Will it take the death/retirement of the baby boomer generation before there can be any real change in the legal profession? Or have we hit critical mass? Is the future finally on our doorstep?

Susskind says his timelines have been adjusting over the years. In 1996, when he was writing The Future of Law, he figured transformation would take about 20 years. When the dotcom craze hit, some folks were saying real change might take five years. "But I still doubted that, because the changes aren't just in technology, they are changes in culture – changes in working practices and in the attitudes of lawyers who have deeply-held feelings about the best ways of delivering services," says Susskind. "I don't see changes in three to six months, I think it's more than three to six years, and well beyond. The transformation of the entire profession takes a long time."

Susskind describes the current status as "incremental revolution. We see development in various stages. When they add up, you look back, and go, 'wow!'," he says. "But it's not a big bang, where we will switch on the lights and the legal world will all be different. We will see cumulative changes that together, over a couple of decades, will result in a radically different way to deliver legal services."

What's in it for me?

Christian dismisses the idea that baby boomers are slowing the train. "I think the issue is not generational but organisational – the structure of law firms and the partnership system supports a vested-interest short-termism.

"Law firms' management teams only care for what they can get out of it today," he says. "They have no interest in what happens to the firm in few years' time, because they'll be gone by then."

Consultant Jeffrey Brandt, a former chief information officer at several large international firms, says there are three reasons why Susskind's message is finally hitting the windscreen of firm leaders.

"The tipping point has, finally, been reached," says Brandt. Law firms can no longer control how they will interact with their clients – "they are forced to re-evaluate how they deliver services and make changes to remain viable".

The second factor is that the kinds and types of work that is viewed as commodity is expanding, he says. (Perhaps the best evidence of this can be seen in the e-disclosure arena, with out-and-out revolt by companies over fees for document reviews.)

A third factor, says Brandt, is that "the controller of services is changing. No longer is it just the general counsel you deal with". Negotiation for legal fees now involves corporate buyers – "and to them there seems to be little difference between lawn services, coffee, paper, fleet truck tires and legal services".

Two components

Lawyer/consultant Theodore Banks spent most of his career as a leader in Kraft Foods' general counsel office. Banks sees change, but says it's a gradual process.

Legal services, he says, has "two components: mechanical and analytical. The mechanical piece – think about drafting documents, workflow – can certainly be automated to a greater extent than it has been already. That takes a push from someone – a smart general counsel, an aggressive younger lawyer who is not afraid to use technology, a client who insists on a certain electronic tool, etc," observes Banks, of counsel to Schoeman Updike & Kaufman and the president of Compliance & Competition Consultants.

"The status quo is very comfortable for someone who does not have a financial incentive to change, but the cumulative effect of better technology, the requirement for more transparency, younger minds and financial pressure is pushing this along."

The analytical process, says Banks, will also be aided by technology, "but that is a way behind, and probably will never be automated. Clients select lawyers for a variety of reasons. Price and speed enter into the equation, surely, but the overwhelming reason is that they feel comfortable with the lawyer.

"The ideal lawyer not only knows his or her stuff, but has the ability to get on the same wavelength as the client. The client feels comfortable based on a number of subjective factors that aren't going to be automated."

From the lawyer's side, the key requirement here is the wisdom or judgement derived from both training and experience that allows a response to a legal problem that may actually encompass many other issues, he says. "Yes, artificial intelligence tools that might capture legal wisdom (in addition to capturing boilerplate) are being developed, but these are a long way off, and will never provide the ability to comfort a client. My fear is that a focus on automation and cost-cutting will result in an overemphasis on the mechanical to the exclusion of the value of the analytical part of a lawyer's services."

Confusion

Christian suggests that many professionals don't quite understand Susskind's model. "I think the problem for many lawyers has been seeing commoditisation as an either/or choice – either cheap, simple bent-bumper motor claims, or it's bespoke work," says Christian.

"Susskind rightly says there is no one-size-fits-all model, and that instead, we are in a 'multi-sourcing' world. When deconstructing legal work into its component elements, there may be as many as 12 different approaches, ranging from automation at one end, to face-to-face meetings between the client and the lawyer at the other," he says. "I think lawyers need to just get over it and accept that legal work lends itself to a mixture of approaches."

Before the economy crash, Susskind observes, the legal profession paid only lip service to commoditisation, because they didn't need to do more. Banks suggests that the economy has been a factor in adoption of new ways to practice law, "but it also caused some firms to become more conservative and avoid radical new ideas. Although some mechanical tools that allowed for the replacement of a lawyer with a paralegal or clerk are certainly attractive".

Says Christian: "Law firms thought the boom would never bust – and all the time they were making so much money, they had no need to invest in modern business process technology. As one IT director put it, how do you tell a room full of millionaires they are doing it wrong?

"I suspect many will drift back to their old ways if the economy recovers, and the investments in technology will not happen," Christian predicts. "But the biggest challenge," he continues, "will happen if corporate counsel finally start standing up to external law firms and saying, 'hey, that's a rip-off!' We've had a consumer revolution in just about every other area, and so far lawyers have been immune. Just take the billable hour – you go to a lawyer for what they know, not how long it takes them to find the answer."

So how do you spot the firms that 'get it'? Leadership, says Susskind. "I look for leaders who are broad-minded, because technology today is far too important to be left to the technologists."

Monica Bay is editor-in-chief of Law Technology News, in which a version of this article first appeared.

• For more, see The word of Susskind is still not heard in corporate land