Why ‘Tomorrow’s Lawyers’ is Required Reading
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Far and away the best analyst and predictor of the evolution of the legal marketplace is Richard Susskind, the U.K.-based academic and futurist.
Richard has a new book out called Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future.
It is a slim and readable volume, laying out the case why law will be in a period of accelerating change, driven by technology (Richard tends to look at law through an IT lens), client demand and now opening up the legal provider market, led by the U.K.’s Clementi reforms which allow for non-lawyer ownership of law firms.
If you’re in any kind of management or leadership role in law (or you just care about your own career), I would say it’s a prerequisite to read Tomorrow’s Lawyers.
When I spoke to a meeting of law school Deans last month, several deans told me they had made Tomorrow’s Lawyers required reading for faculty, in part because they suspected students were already familiar, if not with the book, then certainly with the underlying theses.
My orientation has always been a little different from Richard’s, emphasizing more how law will “Normalize” to conform to other processes that clients manage and other markets for services. But in any event, we both certainly diverge from “Old Normal” law thinking, which emphasizes over and over again the uniqueness of lawyers and the uniqueness of every problem that lawyers face (what Richard calls “bespoke” or custom work).
The core idea in Richard’s book (so rooted in IT thinking that when I showed it to a friend he said “yeah, that’s the slide we had in IT in 1996”) is that legal work will migrate from the bespoke (an elegant English word that seems to add 5 IQ points to anyone who says it) tocommodity work (a dumb and counterproductive word which is only used to dismiss certain work as beneath the speaker’s dignity), evolving through intermediate stages of Standardisation (I’ll use his spelling, maybe I’ll get the 5 IQ point bonus as well), Systematisation and Packaging before reaching Commoditisation.
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