This series hasn’t exactly been a joyride so far, has it? Following the complacent satisfaction of Stage 1, the legal profession is not currently enjoying Stage 2 and will be even less fond of what Stage 3 is likely to inflict. You can be forgiven if this feels like a movie you’d like to leave halfway through. But while this might seem to be a depressing tale of lawyers’ relentless decline and eventual extinction, that’s not the actual story.

Lawyers, we need to keep in mind, really matter. We serve critical functions in society: we provide dispassionate representation and advocacy in dispute resolution; we facilitate countless significant social and business transactions; and we’re capable of providing tremendous and unique value to clients of all stripes — value that commands a premium price. Law, along with medicine and ministry, are the three original professions: the highly esteemed servants of the community and the building blocks of a meaningful and civilized society. No one is going to outsource or automate a way around that.

It’s my belief that, as a profession, we’ve lost sight of these facts. We’ve been distracted by the easy money to be made through providing essentially clerical tasks and conducting low- or middling-value transactions — tasks that we took on simply because the market lacked other providers whose skills and sophistication were better aligned with this kind of work. Our monopoly on the legal market narrowed our vision, fogged up our priorities, and misdirected our talents. We became myopic and even selfish, believing that we were entitled to exclusive access to any work that was law-related.

I think that lawyers in the future will, in a strange way, come to appreciate that the disruptive forces currently sowing chaos in our lives actually did us a favour. By taking away work that doesn’t require our expertise, they’ll prevent us from punching below our weight and force us to go pick on challenges our own size. Not only that, but by breaking through the pricing floor and lowering the financial threshold for consumer access to the law, they’ll do something lawyers have never been able to do: they’re going to grow the legal market.

By the time Stage 4 comes about — and I believe parts of it could start emerging during Phase 3 — lawyers will be surprised and delighted to see a much larger and more dynamic market emerge. And in those circumstances, we won’t really mind having more people digging into what will have become a much bigger pie.

Stage Four: The Expanding Market

Features:

(a) The Market:

• Combination of multiple providers and affordable prices opens up huge, previously latent legal market.
• Innovation in legal services, driven now by both lawyer and non-lawyer providers, greatly increases range and depth of accessible legal work.
• Market expansion accelerates rapidly; legal job growth returns, demand for lawyers increases (although not often in traditional roles).
• Systems and IT advances achieve unprecedented levels of accuracy and efficiency in basic legal documents and processes.
• Routine and straightforward legal work is subject to fierce competition by warring national and global franchises, including legal publishers, accounting firms, software companies, and even a few “white label” law firms.
• Commoditization of legal product is widespread; industry norms and standards are established for basic products and services.
• Concept of “legal insurance” becomes more commonplace, often as part of homeowners’ policies or corporate benefits, creating more legal opportunities.
• A new legal service ecosystem grows up, one in which individual lawyers and non-lawyers temporarily collaborate on projects under the direction of senior project-managing counsel.
• Civil court system is transformed into smaller but more prestigious entity, with lawyers and judges handling complex, high-stakes, or socially significant civil disputes; parallel “private” courts and ODR providers oversee adjudication and resolution of other civil matters.

• Elite law firms, from solos to global giants, thrive by handling high-quality, highly remunerative, mission-critical work: they are strategists, counsellors, and trusted advisors to individuals, businesses and institutions.
• “Preventive law” emerges as a viable legal career: managing risk and avoiding legal troubles for corporate and consumer clients on a monthly retainer.
• Lawyers become increasingly integrated within diverse corporate and social enterprises; higher evolution of “in-house” lawyers.
• Just three types of “outside counsel” dominate the private bar: mobile virtual solo, boutique specialist, and global corporate problem-solver and value-provider.
• New lawyer organizations evolve, replacing the associations of the past, using online platforms to create fluid, collaborative, job-sharing, skill-building networks.
• Legal education is transformed by emergence of “specialist” law programs focusing on specific industries and “bridge” providers linking formal education with practical training. Online legal education becomes ubiquitous.
• A few elite lawyers continue to bill by the hour, the last holdouts in a market where pricing is almost entirely predictable, cost-aligned, value-based and market-driven.

Era: 2019-?

Every period of creative destruction comes to an end; every process of renewal eventually completes itself. After many difficult years of contraction and frustration, lawyers finally see a change in their fortunes.

By Stage 4, the ongoing process of competition and innovation has greatly reduced the internal cost and external price of many legal products and services. Lawyers who had been bemoaning this trend are happily introduced to the economic principle that lower prices expand markets. More people and businesses can now afford more legal services than they could before: the latent legal market is finally cracked. Moreover, thanks to the attrition of the past few brutal years, the number of lawyers in the profession is much reduced, setting up a new supply-and-demand dynamic.

Only a handful of companies worldwide now provide legal knowledge, documents and processes, and like the Amazons and FedExes and Wal-Marts of the past, they rely on extreme efficiency, standardized production, cutthroat pricing and just-in-time delivery to compete for market share. No 20th-century law firm could survive in this market, and few 21st-century lawyers want to do this work anyway. They have other, better pursuits.

This is where lawyers see their resurgence. As Clayton Christensen points out, efficiency innovations destroy jobs, whereas truly disruptive innovations create jobs. Stages 2 and 3 gave us “efficiency innovations” in law, at the cost of many lawyer positions; but Stages 3 and 4 usher in the “disruptive innovation” era, during which lawyer employment opportunities return, stronger than before. Preventive law — Richard Susskind’s famous “fence at the top of a cliff, rather than an ambulance at the bottom” — is an excellent illustration of this trend: proactive lawyering that manages risk and reduces problems discovers its market value.

High-level, highly demanding and highly compensated legal work experiences a renaissance in this era. The world has gotten no simpler in the last 10 years — in many ways, it has become far more complex and confusing. Anonymity and relativism undermine social and business bonds, technology and big data create powerful and frightening new social forces, shades of grey are everywhere in public and private life. The authority, clarity and precision of lawyers now become a necessary and valuable presence in the market. Freed from our previous dependence on paper and product, we return to our higher purpose and our more valuable business and social roles.

The industries and specialties that grew up around the old legal profession undergo similar transformations in Stage 4. Lawyer associations survive by becoming lighter, quicker, more businesslike and more aspirational, representing lawyers’ newly redefined interests and repositioning themselves as networkers, connecters, trainers, R&D providers and thought leaders. Legal education is still uneasily re-engineering itself, but a new balance is emerging between educators focused on classical jurisprudence and legal philosophy and trainers focused on professionalism, ethics and business acumen for both initial and continuing professional development. Legal publishers have become legal software developers and knowledge management engineers.  Everyone has had the opportunity either to raise their game or leave the playing field altogether.

A word about litigation. I gave a presentation earlier this year to Canada’s chief judges and chief justices, wherein I advised that their traditional role as private dispute adjudicators was at risk. The soaring costs of court litigation, in terms of both time and money, had placed it out of most people’s reach and had encouraged the development of less formal but more accessible dispute resolution providers. I expect that the majority of disputes currently pushed through the court system will eventually be privately resolved (and perhaps even privately enforced, although I’d prefer to see the state continue in that role). The civil justice system may simply be too big and too brittle to survive the change to a new legal marketplace.

Civil litigators, in turn, will have to adapt to a market in which the traditional sources of litigation revenue are routed out of the legal profession (towards e-discovery providers, game-theory bargaining systems, data-crunching prediction systems, etc.). Lawyers’ competitive strengths in dispute resolution reside in negotiation and advocacy skills, especially the latter; these are what make great “trial lawyers.” There will be a role for skilled barristers, perhaps as advocates in the traditional court system, perhaps as adjudicators in new private court systems. I expect there will be, on a volume basis, less civil litigation work, but it will be more demanding and fulfilling work of higher quality, and it will pay more handsomely than all the endless hourly-billed tennis matches that now bog down our courts.

It’s quite possible that Stage 3 painted too dark a picture of lawyers’ position, and that Stage 4 paints too brightly. Certainly, what I’m outlining here are the most positive outcomes for everyone — lawyers, non-lawyers, and most of all, clients. There are bound to be stumbles, breakdowns and various crises — revolutions rarely deliver a universally happy ending and they rarely wind up where the first revolutionaries intended. But what I do believe is that this future is possible and plausible — and if things break right and the market responds rationally, even likely. We’ll need luck and leadership, to be sure — but then, when haven’t we needed those things on our side?

I have one more post in mind for this series, Stage 5. Like Stage 4, it could run concurrently with other stages, and it could arguably be considered part of this legal market expansion period. But there are elements of it that deserve more attention than today’s entry can accommodate. It goes beyond expansion, all the way to transformation.

Jordan Furlong delivers dynamic and thought-provoking presentations to law firms and legal organizations throughout North America on how to survive and profit from the extraordinary changes underway in the legal services marketplace. He is a partner with Edge International and a senior consultant with Stem Legal Web Enterprises.