The Red Velvet Lawyer

A Practice Life  I Can Hardly Imagine Yesterday, in the context of discussing new grads working in legal temp jobs, I said: Many of these document review jobs have begun disappearing as they move offshore or get done by computers that can scan, analyze, and report the data in ways not possible for easily-bored, human brains.    This shift is a small part of the  commoditization  of law jobs that Richard Susskind discusses in his book  Tomorrow's Lawyers . Commodity work will continue to lose value in the marketplace and the price for it will move towards $0.    When I read that book this summer, I realized that a recessionary economy was just one of the challenges new grads will face over the life of their careers. But, I will save that discussion for a later posting. This December 5, 2013 bl og posting  by Rohit Talwar discusses some of the "disruptive" legal technologies that ...

Here's the headline: Adapting to the Current Realities of the Employment Landscape for Lawyers, Half of Pre-Law Students Say They Plan to Use their Law School Degree in a Non-Traditional Legal Job So started an April 11, 2013 news release published by Kaplan Test Prep.  It goes on to report: The employment stats don’t paint a pretty picture for pre-law students looking ahead, but flexibility about their future career and their passion for it is driving them forward. According to a recent Kaplan Test Prep survey of more than 200 pre-law students, 50% say they plan to use their law degree in a non-traditional legal field. Of that 50%, nearly three out of five (58%) said the current job market for lawyers factored into this decision.   Forty-three (43%) percent of survey respondents overall said they plan to use their law degree to pursue a job in the business world rather than in the legal world—which helps explain why 42% said they’d likely pursue an MBA if t...

Richard Susskind, in his new book, Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future (2013), describes the fundamental shift occurring in the legal field.  The 2008 economic downturn accelerated that shift. His theme is simple: To respond to client needs when they seek more value for the money; when technology can perform routine tasks more cheaply, quickly, and accurately than attorneys; when well-trained lawyers live in Asia and can work globally; when most people still have no access to affordable legal services, the legal profession will "dispense with much of our current cottage industry and re-invent the way legal services are delivered."  He calls the situation a "perfect storm" for reform.   He begins by discussing the business model based on hourly billing.  Typically, a firm uses a large number of associates per partner on an assigned project.  Those associates, in earlier times, worked months on document reviews ...