The evolution of the legal services market Stage 4.docVIP

The evolution of the legal services market: Stage 2 By Jordan Furlong ? Published: November 6th, 2012 SHARE:Tweet INSHARE2 In yesterday’s entry, we painted a portrait of a closed legal marketplace long dominated by lawyers, and we considered the positive and negative results of that state of affairs. Today, in the second of five stages of legal market evolution, we’ll look at current events and forecast the likeliest path those events will take in the immediate future. Stage 2: The Breached Market Features: Macro-economic upheaval shatters previous steady state of legal market. Legal work, formerly indivisible, starts breaking into mission-critical, ordinary and commodity tranches. Multiple new providers enter legal industry, aiming at second and third tranches of legal services; legal work starts to leave law firms and go to these new providers. Growing access to legal knowledge enables more “do-it-yourself” law among consumer law clients. New options and financial pressures spur both insourcing and outsourcing of legal tasks by corporate law clients. Lawyers find they have limited regulatory options against emerging competitors, which become legitimized and start to mature. Prices for lawyers’ services fall; in absence of workflow innovation or infrastructure improvements, lawyers’ costs continue to rise; ergo, lawyer profits stall out or decline. Law firms cut positions to preserve profits; employment rates for new lawyers plummet; pool of unattached legal talent grows. Legal technology becomes more disruptive, displacing lawyers from traditional roles. Law schools start to experience pressure from lower enrollment, tuition resistance, extreme bad publicity. In some jurisdictions, lawyers lose power to regulate the legal market and/or themselves (most notably England Wales). Lawyer jobs, for the most part, do not disappear; they relocate (to small centers, non-lawyer companies, India). Movement, not elimination, of labour. Era: 2008-2016 This is more or less