Looking for innovation in the delivery of legal solutions leads naturally to an examination of company of lawyering, as opposed to the practice of law, and there is a significant range of possible new business models to be considered.
Quite a few of these are touched on in Richard Susskind’s function, which includes his 2009 The Finish of Lawyers. A single of Susskind’s fundamental points is that a lot of what lawyers do is repetitive and not specifically intelligent or inventive. In a small business context, we often refer to something that is higher volume, low ability, repetitive operate as a commodity, and in the business planet it is a effectively recognized pattern that most merchandise have a life-cycle that ends in commoditization.
Certainly this could not come about to one particular of the world’s oldest professions? Susskind makes a very good case that it can and will occur to substantial chunks of what is currently regarded to be the practice of law-in any case where lawyers’ function can reliably be decreased to a procedure.
In the UK for example it is feasible to incorporate a new company on the internet in much less than an hour for about 120.85 and some weeks later you obtain your corporate record books in the post, total with the minutes of your initial shareholders and directors meetings Legalzoom.com in the United States is supplying comparable solutions there. The exact same type of on the internet organization can most likely be done with any legal business that is principally type-filling. Consider the implications of this for immigration law, for example.
A a lot more sophisticated version of this model already exists in the a massive quantity of what are referred to as legal “factories”, which at their finest are internet websites exactly where members of the public enter their personal data which is analyzed by straightforward application that determines regardless of whether they have the kind of case that is profitable to the legal solutions provider. If they do then the information is then passed on to a group of paralegals for further processing, whilst the paralegals are supervised by a smaller quantity of lawyers at the top rated of the pyramid. Personal injury, divorce (quickie-divorce.com!), and unfair dismissal claims are all being processed this way in the UK, and in the US Legalzoom.com covers wills, divorce, and even patent filings with a equivalent model.
The clear criticism of this kind of model is that it high-grades the simplest and easiest situations so that the “law firm” can make the most money for the least work. This is anathema to those lawyers who pride themselves on carrying out excellent and creative perform for customers who most require their aid. Having said that, the improved view is that because these commoditized enterprise models can deliver simple solutions so cheaply, they offer access to legal solutions to that significant majority of the public who could in no way otherwise afford to hire a lawyer.
Off-shoring class action lawsuit to India or other low-expense economies (legal course of action outsourcing, or “LPO”) is an additional class of small business models. The LPO business in India is only six years old, but it is currently worth 124.38+ million in annual sales. There are some quite large law firm and corporate customers (Microsoft, and Rio Tinto for instance) who are receiving excellent results, and in IP it is becoming a pretty nicely recognized path-prior art searches and patent invalidity analyses are often performed in India. The financial forces pulling towards LPO are overwhelming, and LPO alone has the possible to both revolutionize and globalize the delivery of legal services around the planet.
Moreover, the tentative trend established in the UK towards enabling non-lawyer ownership of law firms has implications for far more dramatic transform, such as IPOs of international firms or the entry of hedge funds these scenarios raise virtually as a lot of issues about ethics as they do possibilities for innovation.