I have a confession: the whole Legal Services Act (LSA)/Tesco law thing bores me terribly. Legal Week was so quick off the mark to cover the saga that my interest was exhausted by the point the profession started taking it seriously. The jargon, the acronyms, the thicket of regulation, the personal injury – it's too much even for an industry anorak to sustain attention. And yet the success of the LSA's authors in cloaking historic reform of the UK's £25bn legal market in torturous language should not obscure how fundamentally the profession is being – and already has been – shaken up.

You only have to look back to the context of the Act's creation to see how substantially it has already remade the legal industry and encouraged an environment in which innovation could, if not quite flourish, then no longer be actively resisted. Often that has had little to do with the actual rules. Many of the alternative models could have been deployed in some form well before the Act came into force. Volume arms, legal processing, accountancy-linked networks, companies offering legal advice – in various guises they have been previously tried.

But the LSA – together with a tough commercial environment and a subtle but perceptible shift in the buying habits of bluechip clients – has fostered an environment in which such models can begin to gain currency and probably soon will start to provide a credible alternative to major law firms. And hopes that the revolution will sweep the high street only to stop conveniently at the barricades of the corporate legal market are also wishful thinking – too many people are targeting the business sector, and companies are already heavy users of volume legal services.

Will the future be about investment in law firms or retailers offering law? It's far from certain. Investing in core partnerships is so difficult that there seems to be more interest in minority stakes or project finance-style structures. And many financiers seem to be (probably rightly) turning their attention now towards non-law firm structures such as document creation firms or legal process outsourcers.

But while it's often said that commercial law firms are in denial about the coming revolution, generally I don't think that's true. There is conservatism, yes, but also a wider acceptance now that something radical is happening that law firms will have to increasingly factor into their plans. In many cases that may well mean stealing ideas and models from non-traditional legal rivals.

Whether that will be enough to counter the market-disrupting forces that will surely emerge is impossible to say at this stage, but those who dismiss the profession easily often end up looking foolish. Law firms are certainly too ready to find reasons to keep doing business the same way, but they are also stuffed with intelligent and motivated people and, as organisations, have the proven ability to hustle fast when change is demanded. Which is just as well, because it's demanded now.