Here’s one possibility (not one which I’m yet willing to go to the wall for, not without thinking about it much more, but perhaps worth considering): It’s entirely possible that there simply is no “other shoe”, and that there is nothing beyond “the Platitude phase”.

The analysis of what I’ll call the “Susskind School” is predicated on the assumption that there’s going to be some kind of radical change in the delivery of legal services – without ever identifying quite what that radical change will look like. It’s an analysis which gathers up a bunch of phenomena, puts them in a group, plops that group next to “the law”, and then confidently predicts “this bunch of stuff is going to change that thing over there, all irrevocable-like”. It’s imposing a teleology on the legal industry without much of an articulation about what that teleology *actually looks like*.

I was taken by this statement of Susskind’s: “All that can be discerned in relation to the long term is a common assumption — whether on the part of scholars, professional bodies, government agencies or leading law firms — that legal service of tomorrow will be quite similar to that of today; perhaps more efficient and more business-like but not fundamentally different in nature.” Susskind evidently thinks that that “common assumption” is fundamentally, irrevocably *wrong*. But having read the book, I’m still stuck for an explanation of quite *why* it is so apparently incorrect.

In short, it’s at least *possible* that beyond the Platitude phase there only *is* marginal improvements in efficiency. There won’t be a moment of revolution, but only incremental changes which, perhaps decades from now, perhaps only on even longer-term scales, will only in hindsight be revealed as fundamental alterations – and perhaps not even that.

I always chuckle when I hear the term “alternative billing.” Maybe someday hourly billing will be the “alternative” instead of the “normal?”