In the second extract from his forthcoming book, The End of Lawyers?, published in Times Online, Richard Susskind revisits his predictions in 1996’s The Future of Law:
I argued that … many of our fundamental assumptions about the nature of legal service and the nature of legal process would be challenged by the coming of information technology and the internet. In other words, much that we had always taken for granted in the past, about the way that lawyers work and the way non-lawyers receive legal guidance, would change through technology. …
I believe now, and I believed then, that we are in a transitional phase between the print-based industrial society and the IT-based information society. Only when knowledge-based technologies allow us to manage more effectively these mountains of data we have created, will we be fully in the information society. …
I believe there is not just a latent legal market for the ordinary citizen but also for major organisations, too, when they find it difficult to secure legal guidance on all those occasions when they need it. …
I had in mind the notion that as citizens we should be able to find out easily and quickly what our legal entitlements are, and in so doing, we should be able to avoid legal disputes. …
I argued then that hyper-regulation means not that there is too much law by some objective standard, but that there is too much law given our current methods of managing it. Of course, I was creeping towards the suggestion that, with the coming of knowledge-based technologies, the volume of the law would be more easily managed with the assistance of our systems. …
When I suggested ten years ago that e-mail would become the principal means by which clients and lawyers would communicate, many people suggested I was dangerous, that I was probably insane and that I certainly did not understand anything about security or confidentiality.
In fact it was somewhat more than ten tears ago. The Future of Law was published in early 1996 and was thus written in late 1995. That year is significant, for then only a few of us had awoken to the internet; only a handful of firms had websites; there was no free law to speak of and no e-commerce; Google’s founders were still in high school and facebooks were still published annually in hard covers. So it’s all the more remarkable for Susskind to have so accurately predicted the shape of the legal internet today (and of tomorrow – for, as he says, we are only half way through his 20-year view).
Couldn’t agree more. And it’s not only the sharing of legal information and the commoditisation of certain areas of legal practice that will change (and are changing). We may also see greater use of online tools by lawyers – hopefully managed within the bounds of their professional/ethical obligations – to challenge the views of those that govern them. We will see (and are seeing) government practices of a legal and regulatory nature being challenged by way of partisan blogs and wikis. Further, the silos of knowledge and intellectual capital residing within large law firms will be (and are being) cracked away at by the forces of influential corporate clients. Interesting times.