Who is shaping our brave new world?

Picking up on my immediately preceding post, an excellent article, The road ahead, in The Law Gazette on the future of legal services.

In the present turn down it may sometimes seem difficult to look beyond the month end figures, but long term survival requires it, to say nothing of what the up and coming generation expects.

I cannot do better than paste in the final paragraphs,

For Susskind, the questions he always poses to the profession are: why is it that people pay lawyers good money? What value is it they’re bringing? The best answer he has seen comes from accountants KPMG, whose global mission statement is, he paraphrased, ‘we exist to turn our knowledge into value for the benefit of our clients’.

‘I think it’s a fantastic way of summarising what all of us as professional advisers seek to do,’ Susskind concluded. ‘We have knowledge, expertise, inside ideas that clients want to apply in their circumstances. It doesn’t say we exist to supply one-to-one consultative advisory service on an hourly billing basis…

‘The thing I want people to think about in the future is in the legal market we have to strive to find even more imaginative and creative and, I suspect, cost-effective ways of transferring our knowledge to our clients in a way they can apply in their circumstances.’

To do so, we also have to work out our strategies taking into account three or four key issues

1) The future will not be more of the same. Read Futurewise, Six Faces of Global Challenge by Patrick Dixon.

2) The market for legal services is not effective: if you haven’t yet read Stephen Mayson’s paper Legal Services Reforms: Catalyst, Cataclysm or Catastrophe, you should. The problem? ‘An oversupply of qualified people without a corresponding increase in “qualified lawyer” work’; the result? ‘Too many qualified lawyers, too many law firms, and too many equity partners: and a market ripe for reform. . . [leading to] consolidation, merger, and, occasionally, failure’.

3) Legislation is simply accelerating inevitable change: the Legal Services Act will open the profession to new entrants, but technology, the great driver of change, is already altering the way our clients seek and take legal services (and this takes me back to The mobile lawyer, posted yesterday).

4) The aspirations and expectations of the next generation, and the one following them, are not the same as those of us who currently determine the course of law firms.

The mobile lawyer

Shortly after reading The Road Ahead in the latest Law Gazette (I will come back to that in a later post), I read Jordan Furlong’s post Lawyers in the smartphone era in Law 21.

I cannot help but feel somewhat depressed by Furlong’s vision of the future for lawyers, the consequence he anticipates of two smartphone-related developments.

The first is that thanks to smartphones, every lawyer is going to be mobile.It’s true that the Blackberry has already made itself a significant presence in the lives of many business lawyers, for better and for worse. But as a general rule, the lawyer’s center of gravity remains where it’s always been: her office, where she keeps her desk, chair, landline phone, files, books, and desktop computer. That center of gravity is now shifting to the lawyer herself. With the smartphones of the near future at her command, that lawyer will be able to do everything on the road — call, e-mail, Web browse, review files, read cases, write memos, etc. — that she now does in the office. In fact, it’ll be expected of her. A lawyer with a smartphone is a walking law firm — one that hardly ever closes. Lawyers who obsessively check their smartphone messages are considered antisocial nuisances today, but before long, they’ll be the norm. I’m not saying that’s good, but I am saying it’s pretty much inevitable.

In many ways, I think we are already there. It may not be smartphones yet in the UK, but the BlackBerry is ubiquitous, and for many lawyers it is not where their desk is that is important, but where their client’s desk is. For lawyers, as for many other professionals, mobility is essential (although I remain to be convinced by the BlackBerry).

And Furlong’s second impact category?

Among the tens of thousands of future applications [being developed by iPhone, BlackBerry, and others] will be many that deliver legal services directly to clients. For lawyers, this development could represent either a threat (yet another way in which computers are reducing traditional lawyer work to a series of algorithms) or an opportunity (someone with legal knowhow and experience has to design those algorithms; why not a law firm?). But either way, over the next decade, smartphones will become a legal service delivery medium. Now’s the time for lawyers to start dealing with that.

Some people will say that there’s no way a simple cellphone will ever be able to do lawyer work. Some people used to say that about computers, too. So I’ll take this opportunity to update one of my axioms: the problem won’t be smartphones doing what lawyers can do; it’ll be lawyers continuing to do what smartphones can do.

A better class of riot

Whingeing about the dire state of the economy with a good friend, who is the chairman of a major UK accountancy group, he told me of a recent dinner he and his wife had attended somewhere in the West Country. The property developer sat next to his wife told her, in all seriousness, that he had just bought an estate in the Welsh Marches, to which he was imminently retiring, because he expected social breakdown and riots on the streets of London by Christmas. . . and didn’t think the Metropolitan Police were up to stopping them.

Perhaps that explains what Devon & Cornwall Constabulary were doing in Waitrose car park in Okehampton in the middle of last week, kitted out in full riot gear, and role playing in and among the public. Nonetheless, if you are going to practice how to control food rioting, Waitrose seems an unlikely venue.

When did you last see your father?

Research, conducted by HR consultancy Hudson UK, shows, if today’s report in The Lawyer is to be believed, that 30 per cent of legal professionals are so dissatisfied with their current role that they would not want to see their children in their job. Martin Luise, director of legal recruitment at Hudson, is quoted in Lawyers’ kids warned against following in their footsteps, as saying,

These findings are very disturbing, especially with the current economic conditions. That so many legal professionals would not want to see their children follow in their footsteps points to a workforce that is both unhappy and lacking confidence.

I don’t agree that the workforce is unhappy (or any more unhappy than any other profession’s workforce). Nor do I think it demonstrates a lack of confidence in the profession. Not wanting your children to follow in your footsteps does not necessarily mean that you are dissatisfied in your job. Instead, it is perhaps a realistic evaluation of where we see the profession in ten years, the opportunities that are available to Millenials that weren’t to us, and, more generally, changing attitudes and expectations.

Although I haven’t actively encouraged my children to consider law as a career; equally, had any of them wanted to do so, I would have encouraged them. A number of my friends (not lawyers) have asked me to talk to their children, and I have, and some are now lawyers. I have also always had trainees, at last count some 50 over the years, so have, at least at second hand, an understanding of what has driven a generation and a half of people to enter the law.

But closer to home, what put my children off, and they have made no bones about this, was the work. “We never saw you when we were little; you were always working” is what the eldest told me recently. That, I replied, is an occupational hazard for the children of a corporate transactional lawyer!

What are universities for?

With two through university and in the world of work, two going through and one trying to decide if and when, universities and university life are much in our minds.

I read Jonathan Bate’s article, The wrong idea of a university, in the first edition of Standpoint, shortly before a recent event, where much was made, by the speakers from our university hosts, of the need to retain graduates in the region and to grow and encourage entrepreneurs. Bate writes,

With Gordon Brown’s restructuring of government departments, higher education is now under the control of the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (“DIUS”). We no longer have a Department for Education in this country. The idea of a university as “a place of teaching universal knowledge” — Cardinal Newman’s phrase — has, it seems, no relevance in Brown’s Britain. Higher education must now justify itself in terms of the “innovation and skills agenda”. Crudely put, academic research must pay its way by generating real returns in the wider economy. The Research Councils’ big new idea, driven by DIUS, is “knowledge transfer”. This is defined as “improving exploitation of the research base to meet national economic and public service objectives” to be achieved by means of “people and knowledge flow” together with “commercialisation, including Intellectual Property exploitation and entrepreneurial activities”.

Fine sounding words from DIUS but deep down, like so much else from this government, absolutely meaningless. One of Bate’s conclusions in his hard copy article (but strangely missing from the website one) is that,

Higher education has been hijacked by the quangocracy: teaching is neglected, research is distorted by bogus assessment methods, and trust in professional judgement is gone.