The lawyers and law firms of the future: a guide to the new legal landscape
When Marty McFly travelled far, far into the future (erm, to 2015), he found a new world of CCTV, biometrics and video conferencing. He also found that lawyers had been abolished...
March 25, 2015 at 06:29 AM
3 minute read
When answering the big and difficult questions in life, pop culture can be much underrated. And when thinking about the new legal landscape, what better place to start than Back To The Future – a favourite from my teens. When Marty McFly travelled far, far into the future (erm, to 2015), he found a new world of CCTV, biometrics and video conferencing. So far, so accurate. He also found that lawyers had been abolished.
So, we already know that the profession is in a period of intense change, but what will be the outcome? Is the end point a Back To The Future legal apocalypse, or can we be a bit more hopeful? It's not easy to navigate or to see where it's heading, even for those of us that are somewhere within it.
However, at Lawyers on Demand (LOD) we're always interested in what tomorrow holds. You may remember that last year we asked Jordan Furlong, one of our favourite legal future-gazers, to offer his thoughts on the opportunities that have arisen for lawyers across the board out of all this ongoing upheaval. This time, we've asked him to provide some insight into the post-disruption legal world, examining what its shape, services, new highways and dead-ends might look like. Jordan was one of the first people to spot the changes coming to the profession and is well placed to be our guide to what the new scenery might look like. We hope you find his thinking interesting, or at least that it prompts you to consider how it might affect your slice of the profession.
What follows is just one possible way to see the new lay of the land. One of the most interesting questions is, perhaps, what have we missed? Classic film as it was, Back to the Future failed to see the coming of the mobile phone and the internet. Quite important omissions. I wonder what the equivalent is in the legal landscape.
What have we missed? Maybe you're designing it already…
The full guide to the new legal landscape is available to download for free from Legal Week Law – if you are not already a registered user, you can sign up here.
Simon Harper is a Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) consultant and co-founder of LOD. This article, which originally appeared on the LOD website, has been republished for the Turning Points hub, an online career development resource from Legal Week in association with BLP.
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