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First published in November 2008, at a time of grave economic uncertainty, The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services predicts significant new pressures on the legal marketplace and, in turn, great change in the world of legal services. This book is the long awaited sequel to the Richard’s legal bestseller of 1996, The Future of Law. In that earlier work, he claimed that the law would be transformed by IT. The book generated enormous interest and influenced public policy-makers and top managers in law firms around the globe. Many of its predictions have already come to pass.
In The End of Lawyers?, Richard sets a new challenge for all lawyers. He urges them to ask themselves what elements of their current workload could be undertaken more quickly, more cheaply, more efficiently, or to a higher quality using different and new methods of working. He argues that the market is unlikely to tolerate expensive lawyers for tasks that can be better discharged with support of modern systems and techniques. He claims that the legal profession will be driven by two forces in the coming decade: by a market pull towards the commoditisation of legal services, and by the pervasive development and uptake of new and disruptive legal technologies. The threat here for lawyers is clear - their jobs may well be eroded or even displaced. At the same time, for entrepreneurial lawyers, Susskind foresees quite different law jobs emerging which may be highly rewarding, even if very different from those of today.
Contents |
- Introduction – the Beginning of the End?
- The Path to Commoditization
- Trends in Technology
- Disruptive Legal Technologies
- The Future for In-house Lawyers
- Resolving and Avoiding Disputes
- Access to Law and to Justice
- Conclusion – the Future of Lawyers
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| To order the book from Oxford University Press, go to www.oup.com |
| Available also at www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.com |
