The article From Big Law to Lean Law by William Henderson evaluates the death of big law. It talks about how firms are set up for partners to care about what happens while they are partners, and not what happens to the firm once they retire. It points out the big law tends to grow from mergers instead of innovation. Meanwhile new legal vendors are beginning to pop up and build relationships with clients. Big firms are reluctant to hire on more associates, and are cutting attorneys who cannot bring in clients. This is moving towards lean law. This article connects to the problem from the readings where lawyers are thought of as being very expensive, and they over solve problems that could be solved cheaper and quicker by companies like Legal Zoom.
Great article! This has been going on for some time. And sometimes it’s not merely the clients who are unhappy with the “big firm” business model…
http://abovethelaw.com/2015/09/lawyers-flee-layoffs-follow-after-biglaw-firms-pay-problems/
These are great articles. Together with the reading on Entrepreneurs and Lawyers, they made me recall some of my experiences from this past summer. I worked in the legal department for a large insurance company in Boston, and once of their groups was devoted solely to “ideation,” which is basically thinking about the future of insurance and legal services. Members of the group relayed that the practice of law, based on the research by the nation’s largest firms and companies and anticipated advances in technology, would look very different than how it does today. That is a sentiment shared by the Stanford Law professor in this article: “That’s assuming lawyers will still be lawyers by the time 2030 rolls around. F. Daniel Siciliano, a professor at Stanford Law School, argued that as law becomes more open-sourced and readily available to the general public, people will no longer need attorneys to tell them what the law is.
“In 15 years, two-thirds of lawyers won’t practice law, at least not the way they practice now,” Siciliano said. “Many won’t be lawyers at all.”
He pointed to research he has done where an immigration law office that relied more on technology and had fewer human employees (both associates and paralegals) was 10 times more profitable than an office that also relied on technology but had more humans. “Firms with margins to invest in technology will pull ahead of other firms,” Siciliano said.”
http://www.abajournal.com/lawscribbler/article/what_will_lawyers_be_doing_in_5_to_10_years