Reviewed by: Eduardo Reyes
Author: Richard Susskind
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 978 0 19 959361 3
Price: £12.99

In many ways, Richard Susskind has much to be happy about. As he notes in the introduction to the paperback edition of The End of Lawyers?, he can identify key ways in which the global legal market has developed along lines he advocated in his 1996 book The Future Law. Writing in the current environment, Susskind feels confident charting his own vindication. Many more managing partners are arguing that there are too many lawyers, and too many law firms; use of technology has improved dramatically; there is offshoring and legal process outsourcing; the shape of both law firms and legal advice is changing. ‘Over the last 30 years,’ he writes, ‘my conviction about the need for change in the legal system has remained fairly steady. In contrast… the position of most legal practitioners has shifted.’ This is, he thinks, ‘in response to my published views on the future of the legal world…’.

Perhaps because the legal world has changed, The End of Lawyers? lacks the impact of earlier works. As Susskind acknowledges, commenting on technology, lawyer-client relationships, outsourcing and offshoring is a crowded area these days. And for those who comment, Susskind included, there are now many more credible examples of technology, tools and business models that can be generalised in to a hugely changed legal landscape.

This is evident from the number of changes to the book since the hardback edition – the paperback edition is genuinely a revised one, and perhaps frustratingly, if you found the hardback edition useful, it may also be worth buying this latest version too.

The evolution of the law firm model as described by Susskind here is well known: they shed an outer ring of routine worker (the remaining ‘enhanced practitioners’ surround ‘expert trusted advisers at the centre’), only to gain a new outer ring of process managers, which later have ‘cogs’ of routine workers added back on – ‘cogs’ that might or might not be part of a law firm. The recession having accelerated the growth in such trends as ‘legal process outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring’, law firms are paying attention to such modelling.

An interesting aspect of The End of Lawyers? is the place of in-house lawyers in the change described. Some of his favourite innovations in practice are driven by general counsel. Trevor Faure’s ‘Smarter’ model, with its use of organisational psychology, economics and management theory, gets the thumbs up. And Cisco’s Mark Chandler is praised for adopting fixed retainer fees arrangements for dispute resolution work.

But general counsel should negotiate harder on fees, Susskind argues, and have ‘little appetite’ for the technology planning and systems-design that will change the legal system. Unless more respond to ‘intolerable pressure’ on costs, Susskind thinks that some general counsel will be among those who do not have a future.

Advice that could be wholly or partially ‘automated’ is a key part of Susskind’s book, and here there are a growing number of examples for him to cite. These now include products that, price-wise, are within the reach of the public, and smaller legal practices. The ability of the non-lawyer consumer to use these products will, Susskind argues, make possible ‘access’ to legal services that, in many instances, bypass lawyers.

But he does not envisage the actual ‘end’ of lawyers. Some types will wither, others will adapt, and others may sit in different countries to their clients; technology will have a role that is stronger than offering electronic versions of the ‘scribe’ of ancient times, or the cut-and-paste functions that it was utilised for from the mid-90s.

The End of Lawyers is an interesting contribution to the debates that the profession is having. One question is, though, does it make an indispensable contribution? In reality, the walls between the legal sector and other professional or business sectors are increasingly porous, and as a result there are products and business models shaping its development that are being created by people who haven’t read Susskind’s books. He is very much part of the conversation, but no one can pretend that this is still a lecture – which it maybe was in 1996.

Eduardo Reyes

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