The Perfect Storm for Reform: An Overview
You'll have to read Richard Susskind's Tomorrow's Lawyers (2013) or his more in-depth book, The End of Lawyers (2008). Both books are very good and essential reading. He argues that the shifts in the legal market are permanent, accelerated by the 2008 market collapse, and reflect several things. First, corporations and in-house lawyers are demanding more-for-less from outside law firms. This demand undercuts the ability of traditional law firms to use new lawyers to do document review and due diligence reviews. My earlier posting in this series talks about my experience as a young lawyer doing exactly these tasks. In addition, law firms will no longer be able to expect clients to pay for a new lawyer's on-the-job training. Hence, law firms are hiring associates with some practice experience, de-leveraging the number of associates per partner, and farming out the document review to tech based reviewers. They are also f...