Lawyers Won’t Decide The Future of Legal
It’s odd how most of the legal profession assumes that it will determine the future of legal services. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it questioned at a conference or even in conversation.
Panels can discuss the future of the law without even mentioning the client once. It’s funnier still to hear lawyers talk about technology and the future as though they are driving the train and making the decisions.
News flash: they’re not.
The market will determine the future of legal services — and law firms aren’t driving the change. It is the clients, the technology providers, new entrants like the Big Four accountancies, and the public sector — and those changes are well underway.
Let me give you just one example. Take the tech companies that make point solutions to specific challenges like GDPR.
Law firms made a fortune helping clients become GDPR compliant, but staying GDPR compliant is handled by tech companies, not law firms.
These tech companies match their customer’s data against a set of rules. The hard part is finding all of the data. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that they noticed there are rules other than GDPR that require compliance — and that their technology can do that rather well, thank you very much. The tech solves the problem. No lawyers or law firms required.
The growth of these point or focused tech solutions matters to the future of the legal profession, because clients don’t care who solves their problems.
In the immortal words of Harvard Business School Professor Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” Clients want their problems solved by whoever can do it for the best price at the quality required.
There are plenty of challengers to the status quo in legal. One day it will seem just weird that anyone assumed that lawyers and law firms would the ones to decide the future of legal services.
We’re Thinklegaltech. The solution is out there.
