After a night’s sleep, it occurred to me that it might not have been clear what I meant by a “Millennial organisation” in my last post. Here are some thoughts.
We have heard a lot recently about people in Generation Y and how they fee…

I do think the traditional lawyer and law firm business model has fundamental flaws that technology will help expose. It’s not that technology can replace a lawyer or turn a client into a de facto lawyer — the lesson of the self-educated and self-represented client invariably is that this law stuff really is hard, and you really do need someone to help you navigate it. But technology and the Web can create, or facilitate access to, non-lawyer competitors that can do a lot of what lawyers now do more efficiently and much more cheaply.

We’ve already seen basic technology like do-it-yourself will kits and online divorce services take chunks out of lawyers’ markets. Are these services as good as what lawyers do? Absolutely not. But a lot of clients, who don’t want or can’t afford to pay what lawyers charge, figure they can live with that. And there’s no reason to think these services will sit still and never get better than they are now. There are numerous things for which you absolutely need a lawyer’s expertise — but not everything lawyers sell falls into that category, and technology is helping make rapid inroads into this non-exclusive territory.

Then you look at client work outsourced to lawyers in India and other common-law countries with English-speaking lawyers, made possible by the Web. Not all work can be offshored, and certainly none of the demanding, high-end tasks (yet) — but most law firm business models are based on charging for both the high-end and the low-end stuff. Offshore lawyers don’t need to take most of or the best of law firms’ work. They just need to take enough of the due-diligence document-review type of work for which overqualified associates now churn out scads of billable hours. And it’s not just lawyers in India (who are now tackling and getting better at the mid-level tasks) — US companies like Novus Law will happily do the same with algorithms and automation.

I do think that a client is almost always better off with a lawyer than with a facsimile of one. But lawyers have never bothered to make that case to the market, relying instead on the exclusivity that comes from self-regulation and UPL rules and building business models around the unspoken presumption that clients need us more than we need them. Technology is one of the forces changing that, and I think responding to this development is going to be a major challenge for the profession.

I very quickly left, when I realized that the kind of life I needed to lead for the three years it would take to complete law school at night, the time I could expect to put in when starting out, and the employment and income picture that was beginning to frame up before my eyes, I would be happier in civil service. In short, the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

I’m sure there are still attorneys doing very, very nicely, but it’s no longer a license to print money. Nor do I now see as many attorneys who express happiness at practicing law as I did in 1983.