The way I look at it is that there’s no inherent reason why the law firm partnership as we’ve always known it is the best, only, natural, or most effective way of delivering legal services. The point of law, as I’m certain you’d agree, is not to serve the interests of lawyers but to serve those of clients and society generally. So the question becomes, what structures or vehicles for legal service delivery best meet those interests? And the answer is we don’t know. We don’t know in the same way that we didn’t know, before the internet, what was the best way of delivering written news. We only had newspapers, and so we had to go with that. Then the Net came along, and Google, and the iPad, and who knows what else this decade, and now we have an actual marketplace of distribution systems, each competing against the other to find out which is the best, which will survive, and which won’t. It’s messy and chaotic, but it’s what we should expect when a new marketplace is born and hits the ground running.

Similarly, we don’t know what the best way of delivering legal services is, because all we’ve ever really had is the lawyer-controlled law firm: the legal services marketplace was a closed one (and we’ve done our level best as a profession to keep it that way), and so there was no possibility for experimentation, to see whether, just maybe, lawyers didn’t necessarily have the magic formula. Now, whether we like it or not, we will have that experimentation. We’ll have multiple vehicles for the distribution of legal services:

- firms with 100% lawyers and 100% lawyer financing;
- firms with 100% lawyers and 75% non-lawyer financing;
- companies with 50% lawyers and 50% non-lawyer professionals;
- companies with 30% local lawyers and 70% overseas lawyers;
- companies with 10% lawyers and 90% paralegals;
- companies with 1% lawyers and 99% computer algorithms;
- companies with 0% lawyers and 100% operators standing by to take your call.

…and any number of other permutations. Will they all succeed? Probably not. Will they all offer equal levels of quality and accuracy? Of course not. Should they be regulated? Absolutely. Will lawyers perform that regulation? I seriously doubt it. Will the 100% lawyer-populated and lawyer-controlled law firm prove to be the best way for all or even most of the marketplace to get legal services? I doubt that even more. But the market will decide. Let people choose among different models, price ranges, timeliness standards, satisfaction guarantees, product quality, professional indemnities, brand promises, and a host of other factors on which people base their purchasing decisions. Let the market sort itself out, and by the time the dust clears, we’ll have a better sense of where the lawyer-controlled law firm fits into the array. But let’s not delude ourselves that the way we’ve always done it must be the best way it can ever be done. When 80% of the population can’t afford a lawyer for anything more than the simplest of tasks, I’d say we’ve pretty amply demonstrated the failure of our approach to theis market.

Note that nothing I’ve said touches in any way on the standards of lawyer training or conduct, or suggests that they ought to or must be diluted. If anything, I think these standards should be raised, tightened, applied with more vigour than we’ve seen up till now. If you want to be a lawyer, you’d better be very good at what you do — and if we want to compete as a profession with the other imminent entrants to this marketplace, then we’d better ensure that quality is higher than ever, because it’s one of the first things we’re going to have to compete on.

Why, you ask, would anyone invest in a law degree when they could just as easily invest in a firm carrying on the practice of law (“unauthorized” will eventually be an anachronistic adjective, for better of for worse)? If all you want to do is make money, then by all means, take that tuition and plow it into the legal services provider of your choice, and godspeed: you’re an investor, not a lawyer, and that’s great. But if you want to personally and directly serve clients’ interests with a wide range of tools and skills according to high standards of professional conduct, then get the qualifications and get called to the Bar; it remains a great calling. There will always be a market for good lawyers. It won’t be the same market that we know today, it might be less profitable or more profitable, but it will be there, and good lawyers will do just fine serving it.

The bottom line is that how legal services are delivered to the public is going to change, whether we like it or not. It *should* change, because the people in charge of this marketplace for the last several centuries haven’t done nearly a good enough job of making it accessible, affordable or understandable. The question for lawyers is how we’ll respond to that change. If we’re smart enough and savvy enough to combine the best of our professional standards and instincts with the most innovative models soon to be on offer, there’s no reason we can’t continue to dominate the market — but this time, on merit. But if we end up obsessing over whether the people writing the cheques have law degrees, then not only will we miss the train, the train will run us over.