The future of law, maybe

  • “Peace in our time.”
  • “The Beatles have no future in show business.”
  • “There’s no chance the iPhone will get any significant market share.”

Honestly, I don’t know why anyone makes predictions about anything. A hundred unforeseen factors surface immediately after you finish prognosticating and shatter all your starting assumptions. Only a glutton for punishment would actually make predictions about the future on the record.

And so, naturally, I accepted a request recently from Lawyers On Demand to forecast the future of legal careers. The full result of my labours can be found here, but I’ve summarized it briefly below.

In five or so years from now, the traditional legal market should be approaching both its zenith and its logical conclusion. Record-breaking profits for old Boomer partners as they burn up their law firms on their way out the door; the relentless disaggregation of legal work to lower-cost platforms, with ever-fewer associate roles for young lawyers; a metastasizing crisis in the public legal system, coinciding with geopolitical upheaval in a post-Brexit, post-Trump world. So much to look forward to!

As much as this might seem like a first draft of the Avengers: Endgame script, all this really represents is the culmination of decades-long trends: an explosion of change in a legal market long overdue for it, against the backdrop of massive generational transition and technological chaos. The good news, and there is some, is that new opportunities for legal employment and value creation will start to flourish in this period, especially for lawyers with modern skills and diverse experiences. Radically different law firm business models will start to emerge.

Fast forward 15 years from now, and the picture gets brighter. There’ll be a new international order, and while it might not necessarily be one you like, at least it will be stable. Governments will hire lawyers to redesign and implement a new public infrastructure in which basic legal services are mandated and provided by the state. Courts will handle mostly criminal and constitutional matters, while most civil litigation will go to private arbitrators and online DR platforms. Family dissolution will be fast, cheap, and run by bureaucrats. You can decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

What will lawyers be doing? Some will be unique specialists, tracking down violations of bilateral personal information protection treaties or building online systems for auditing clients’ compliance with carbon-trading laws. Others will serve regional enterprises from suburban mixed-use developments, or run home-based solo practices using deep knowledge of narrow subjects to draw a worldwide clientele. Others will program and upgrade online consumer law solution engines or deal with more complex matters beyond the software’s reach. And a hardy few will still bill by the hour for advocacy, judgment, counsel, and complex legal advice.

I have very little to say about the legal world 25 years from now, other than that it will probably be helpful to specialize in constitutional, immigration, real estate, or energy law. In a permanently hotter world beset by climate refugees, disappearing coastlines, forced population resettlement, and the rapid development of non-carbon fuels, there should be no shortage of work for you.

Now, look: Am I convinced that all the foregoing, and much more in the full report, will come to pass? Of course not. In case I hadn’t made it clear at the outset, predictions are a mug’s game, useful mostly for future amusement opportunities. But none of the factors behind these forecasts is imaginary or speculative — all you need do is look at the roads we’re driving down today to see that these potential destinations are not outlandish possibilities.

More importantly, the point of my forecasts is to give today’s and tomorrow’s lawyers not just a glimpse of what they might be doing in the 2020s and 2030s, but to remind them that no matter how great or how terrible things turn out to be, the world will still need lawyers. It might not always like us and it probably still won’t fully appreciate us, but it’s going to need us. And we need to be ready to meet those needs, because they’re going to be different and more complex and more challenging than anything we’ve dealt with so far.

So if you entered the law to become rich and influential, I’d suggest you consider another line of work, maybe hedge funds or America’s Got Talent! But if you entered law because you genuinely want to make the world a better place, then I’ve got great news for you: The world wants to be a better place. But it will need help to get there. And it will need you to step up and provide it.

A version of this article was first published by LegalWeek (April 17, 2019) as “Why Tomorrow’s Lawyers Will Be Needed More Than Ever.” My full-length forecast of the mid-range future of legal services, “Through the Legal Looking-Glass,” can be found at Lawyers On Demand’s website.



4 Comments

  1. Michael O'Horo

    Reasonable projections from reasonable foundations. As you say, we’ll see.

  2. Rémi Weiss

    “Fast forward 15 years from now, and the picture gets brighter. There’ll be a new international order, and while it might not necessarily be one you like, at least it will be stable”

    Mr. Furlong, I am really bugged by this premise given we are likely headed to the opposite direction… Might not be the case, but given what we know today, stability is not something most scientists would bet on for the future…

  3. Jordan Furlong

    Rémi, thanks for your comment. I’m envisioning “stability” in the 2030s in relative terms, compared to what I suspect we’re likely to experience in the 2020s, which feels to me like it’s going to be a decade of intense geopolitical conflict as old alliances fall apart, new regional powers start to assert themselves, and the US and Western Europe experience wrenching economic and social change.

    I doubt we’ll see true “stability” for quite some time, and actual “peace” feels like a distant dream. But I suspect we’ll have to take what’s given to us and do the best we can with it.

  4. Steven Churchill

    This is really interesting and entertaining post about the future of law. It’s really helpful for us. Thanks for sharing such a great information with us.


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