Hunting for innovation in the delivery of legal solutions leads naturally to an examination of enterprise of lawyering, as opposed to the practice of law, and there is a substantial range of potential new organization models to be thought of.
Numerous of these are touched on in Richard Susskind’s work, which includes his 2009 The End of Lawyers. 1 of Susskind’s fundamental points is that significantly of what lawyers do is repetitive and not especially intelligent or creative. In a business context, we often refer to some thing that is high volume, low skill, repetitive operate as a commodity, and in the organization world it is a properly identified pattern that most products have a life-cycle that ends in commoditization.
Certainly this could not come about to a single of the world’s oldest professions? Susskind tends to make a fantastic case that it can and will happen to huge chunks of what is presently regarded as to be the practice of law-in any case exactly where lawyers’ function can reliably be decreased to a procedure.
In the UK for instance it is achievable to incorporate a new enterprise online in significantly less than an hour for about 120.85 and some weeks later you get your corporate record books in the post, complete with the minutes of your initial shareholders and directors meetings Legalzoom.com in the United States is offering comparable solutions there. The similar kind of online enterprise can probably be done with any legal small business that is principally form-filling. Consider the implications of this for immigration law, for example.
A far more sophisticated version of this model currently exists in the a substantial number of what are referred to as legal “factories”, which at their best are internet websites exactly where members of the public enter their own information which is analyzed by easy application that determines whether they have the type of case that is profitable to the legal services provider. If they do then the information is then passed on to a team of paralegals for further processing, while the paralegals are supervised by a compact number of lawyers at the prime of the pyramid. Private injury, divorce (quickie-divorce.com!), and unfair dismissal claims are all becoming processed this way in the UK, and in the US Legalzoom.com covers wills, divorce, and even patent filings with a related model.
yoursite.com of this sort of model is that it higher-grades the simplest and easiest circumstances so that the “law firm” can make the most money for the least work. This is anathema to these lawyers who pride themselves on doing very good and creative function for customers who most require their help. However, the superior view is that for the reason that these commoditized company models can deliver very simple services so cheaply, they deliver access to legal services to that big majority of the public who could by no means otherwise afford to employ a lawyer.
Off-shoring legal operate to India or other low-expense economies (legal course of action outsourcing, or “LPO”) is one more class of enterprise models. The LPO industry in India is only six years old, but it is currently worth 124.38+ million in annual sales. There are some really big law firm and corporate clients (Microsoft, and Rio Tinto for example) who are receiving great results, and in IP it is becoming a relatively nicely recognized path-prior art searches and patent invalidity analyses are regularly accomplished in India. The financial forces pulling towards LPO are overwhelming, and LPO alone has the potential to both revolutionize and globalize the delivery of legal solutions about the planet.
In addition, the tentative trend established in the UK towards permitting non-lawyer ownership of law firms has implications for much more dramatic adjust, such as IPOs of international firms or the entry of hedge funds these scenarios raise virtually as a lot of concerns about ethics as they do possibilities for innovation.