Looking for innovation in the delivery of legal solutions leads naturally to an examination of company of lawyering, as opposed to the practice of law, and there is a large variety of prospective new organization models to be deemed.
Several of these are touched on in Richard Susskind’s perform, including his 2009 The Finish of Lawyers. A single of Susskind’s basic points is that a lot of what lawyers do is repetitive and not specifically intelligent or creative. In a business context, we usually refer to one thing that is higher volume, low skill, repetitive perform as a commodity, and in the business enterprise world it is a effectively known pattern that most solutions have a life-cycle that ends in commoditization.
Surely this could not come about to 1 of the world’s oldest professions? Susskind makes a excellent case that it can and will come about to huge chunks of what is at present deemed to be the practice of law-in any case exactly where lawyers’ function can reliably be reduced to a process.
In the UK for instance it is doable to incorporate a new enterprise on line in less than an hour for about 120.85 and some weeks later you get your corporate record books in the post, full with the minutes of your very first shareholders and directors meetings Legalzoom.com in the United States is offering equivalent services there. The exact same kind of on-line organization can possibly be done with any legal company that is principally form-filling. Think about the implications of this for immigration law, for example.
A extra sophisticated version of this model already exists in the a massive number of what are referred to as legal “factories”, which at their ideal are websites exactly where members of the public enter their own information which is analyzed by simple application that determines regardless of whether they have the sort of case that is lucrative to the legal solutions provider. If they do then the information is then passed on to a group of paralegals for further processing, whilst the paralegals are supervised by a tiny number of lawyers at the prime of the pyramid. professional help with settlement agreements , divorce (quickie-divorce.com!), and unfair dismissal claims are all being processed this way in the UK, and in the US Legalzoom.com covers wills, divorce, and even patent filings with a related model.
The clear criticism of this sort of model is that it high-grades the simplest and easiest situations so that the “law firm” can make the most funds for the least work. This is anathema to those lawyers who pride themselves on doing great and creative operate for customers who most want their enable. Nonetheless, the superior view is that for the reason that these commoditized organization models can provide very simple services so cheaply, they deliver access to legal solutions to that massive majority of the public who could never ever otherwise afford to hire a lawyer.
Off-shoring legal perform to India or other low-price economies (legal process outsourcing, or “LPO”) is one more class of company models. The LPO business in India is only six years old, but it is currently worth 124.38+ million in annual sales. There are some incredibly huge law firm and corporate customers (Microsoft, and Rio Tinto for instance) who are acquiring fantastic outcomes, and in IP it is becoming a fairly properly known path-prior art searches and patent invalidity analyses are regularly completed in India. The financial forces pulling towards LPO are overwhelming, and LPO alone has the prospective to both revolutionize and globalize the delivery of legal services about the globe.
Additionally, the tentative trend established in the UK towards enabling non-lawyer ownership of law firms has implications for far more dramatic modify, such as IPOs of international firms or the entry of hedge funds these scenarios raise pretty much as numerous issues about ethics as they do possibilities for innovation.