Jordan Furlong is one of the first-rate commentators on the legal industry. He is an excellent observer, a deep thinker, and skilled and stylish communicator.

Over at Law 21, Jordan has written a set of companion essays that explain the ferment that is now taking hold in the legal industry. Check them out if you need or want the seemingly complex made simple.

The first essay is a highly useful reference guide to NewLaw (#NewLaw), a category coined by the Australian consultant George Beaton. Jordan modestly titled the essay “An Incomplete Inventory of NewLaw,” but its alleged incompleteness does not distract from its usefulness. Complicated things like new business models need to be organized and simplified before we can get our heads around them. Here, Jordan creates a elegant typology and fills it out with example after example. Before Jordan’s essay, few of us could be sure we were discussing the same ideas or concepts.

One of Jordan’s most noteworthy observation is that the talent side of NewLaw is appears to be growing faster in the UK (new models of organizing and delivering legal services and content) while the US seems to be getting the most traction in legal tech. The former is likely due to liberalization of regulations that flow from the UK’s Legal Services Act of 2007 and the latter from the proximity to venture funding. To have similar legal ecosystems developing in different ways is bound to trigger consequences and interactions that we cannot fully anticipate.

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