Making predictions about the future is risky business. First, there’s the largely unavoidable tendency to assume that the arc of history is revealed by what oftentimes are nothing more than today’s fads. Projecting fads forward is how cars with really big fins (that fly, too) became a Hollywood sci-fi movie trope rather than a reality. Second, if you’re wrong there’s no way to get around it. Unlike an expert witness who is usually judged by how convincing her narrative was of the past, the prognosticator’s answers are graded objectively on a pass/fail scale. Then there’s the problem of finding something that’s interesting to say and that can also be heard over the din of all the legal practice soothsayers.

Having moved beyond predicting the death of the billable hour, the death of big firms, of small firms and of mid-sized firms, these soothsayers moved on to predicting the disruption of almost everything lawyers do. There are start-ups that promise to disrupt the way you take depositions, the way you draft corporate documents and the way clients find their way to you. A number of them herald the imminent “Uber-ification” of the law; so that in the very near future with a swipe of the finger a lawyer in a black SUV will be promptly dispatched to the location of his client-to-be so he can chauffer her through the legal process. Or maybe he’ll arrive via drone; one with really big fins.

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