Terrific post. I concur with Friedmann’s comment “[r]eal costs savings mean changing the process, focusing on how lawyers practice.” Your observation that the process for producing work hasn’t changed much over time is spot on. Advancements in tools (e.g., CALR) to assist that process have made some aspects more efficient, but haven’t fundamentally changed the way lawyers approach a single client’s issue. I wonder if the rise of outsourcing isn’t simply another enhancement, something for lawyers to integrate into their practice without fundamentally changing it.

I do wish lawyers and firms would spend more time on KM. The loss of intellectual capital, and in some cases real process change, from one lawyer and department to the next is tragic and wasteful. As your last example suggests, becoming efficient does not mean less profitability. If anything, it’s the exact opposite.

Even giving “the unauthorized practice of law” the most generous interpretation and saying it truly is meant to protect the public from unscrupulous legal service providers, the effect surely is to keep “the practice of law” exclusively a lawyers’ domain. But you can’t UPL an Indian practitioner, a document management company or an online Practice Support Lawyer, and these kinds of competitors are already undermining lawyers’ lock on their markets.

To the extent lawyers have ever sought to justify their rates, they’ve relied on the argument that “no one can do this but us, so you’ll have to accept our prices.” But others can do a lot of this stuff now, and lawyers are scrambling to come up with new rationales for what they charge. They may argue they provide better-quality service, and that’s valid — that’s how markets are supposed to work, different providers finding different price points with which they’re comfortable and at which they can still turn a profit. But lawyers still face the problem that a growing number of clients are quite happy to trade quality for price, and will take the 75% solution at 15% of the cost. I’m not sure lawyers have an answer to that.

You’re quite right that litigation will be largely immune to these forces — you can’t outsource a cross-examination. But the litigation process is still rife with inefficiencies, especially in the discovery phase. You can pay 20 associates to spend three months reviewing millions of documents; or you can outsource it, automate it and knowledge-manage it (the associates may lose their jobs, but they’ll probably lead happier lives). And in any event, the rise of the self-represented litigant is going to take a different kind of toll on litigators.

Actual trial advocacy, and the real hard-line preparation that goes into it, will survive — but these are among the relatively few “pure lawyer” services out there. How many things that lawyers do today could not, under great pressure, be done by someone or something else that’s not a lawyer? Not nearly as many as the profession would like to think. I suspect the next 15-20 years will bear that out.

Isn’t decoupling ephemeral unless the equilibrium between the supply and demand of lawyers changes? Legal fees are directly related to the number of lawyers offering a particular service. The more lawyers offering a particular service in relation to those seeking to buy them, the higher the price, and vice versa?