Contemporary Authors

• Essays on Law and Artificial Intelligence TANO (Oslo, Norway), 1993
• The Future of Law: Facing the Challenges of Information Technology Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996
• Transforming the Law: Essays on Technology, Justice, and the Legal Marketplace Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2001
• The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2008
• Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 2013
• The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 2015

1. The future of the professions : how technology will transform the work of human experts LCCN 2015939043 Type of material Book Personal name Susskind, Richard E., author. Main title The future of the professions : how technology will transform the work of human experts / Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2015. Description xiv, 346 pages : illustration ; 24 cm ISBN 9780198713395 0198713398 Links Contributor biographical information https://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1614/2015939043-b.html Publisher description https://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1614/2015939043-d.html Table of contents only https://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1614/2015939043-t.html CALL NUMBER HD8038.A1 S87 2015 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms Shelf Location FLM2016 072948 CALL NUMBER HD8038.A1 S87 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 2. Tomorrow's lawyers : an introduction to your future LCCN 2012540370 Type of material Book Personal name Susskind, Richard E. Main title Tomorrow's lawyers : an introduction to your future / Richard Susskind. Published/Created Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2013. Description xviii, 180 p. : ill. ; 20 cm. ISBN 9780199668069 (pbk.) 019966806X (pbk.) CALL NUMBER K120 .S87 2013 Copy 1 Request in Law Library Reading Room (Madison, LM242) CALL NUMBER K120 .S87 2013 Copy 2 Request in Law Library Reading Room (Madison, LM242) 3. The end of lawyers? : rethinking the nature of legal services LCCN 2009417383 Type of material Book Personal name Susskind, Richard E. Main title The end of lawyers? : rethinking the nature of legal services / Richard Susskind. Published/Created Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2008. Description xiii, 303 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 9780199541720 (cloth : alk. paper) 0199541728 (cloth : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER K87 .S865 2008 Copy 1 Request in Law Library Reading Room (Madison, LM242) CALL NUMBER K87 .S865 2008 Copy 2 Request in Law Library Reading Room (Madison, LM242) 4. Transforming the law : essays on technology, justice, and the legal marketplace LCCN 00066546 Type of material Book Personal name Susskind, Richard E. Main title Transforming the law : essays on technology, justice, and the legal marketplace / Richard Susskind. Published/Created Oxford [England] ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2001. Description xii, 301 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0198299222 Links Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0637/00066546-d.html Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0637/00066546-t.html CALL NUMBER K87 .S878 2000 Copy 1 Request in Law Library Reading Room (Madison, LM242) 5. The future of law : facing the challenges of information technology LCCN 96017176 Type of material Book Personal name Susskind, Richard E. Main title The future of law : facing the challenges of information technology / Richard Susskind. Published/Created Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1996. Description xvi, 309 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0198260075 (acid-free paper) Links Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0637/96017176-d.html Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0724/96017176-b.html CALL NUMBER K87 .S874 1996 Copy 1 Request in Law Library Reading Room (Madison, LM242) CALL NUMBER K87 .S874 1996 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Law Library Reading Room (Madison, LM242) - STORED OFFSITE 6. Essays on law and artificial intelligence LCCN 94187010 Type of material Book Personal name Susskind, Richard E. Main title Essays on law and artificial intelligence / Richard Susskind. Published/Created Oslo : TANO, c1993. Description iii, 107 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 8251832101 CALL NUMBER K87 .S866 1993 Copy 1 Request in Law Library Reading Room (Madison, LM242) 7. Expert systems in law : a jurisprudential inquiry LCCN 87012254 Type of material Book Personal name Susskind, Richard E. Main title Expert systems in law : a jurisprudential inquiry / Richard E. Susskind. Published/Created Oxford : Clarendon ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1987. Description xvi, 300 p. : ill. ; 22 cm. ISBN 0198255829 : Links Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0636/87012254-d.html CALL NUMBER K87 .S87 1987 Copy 1 Request in Law Library Reading Room (Madison, LM242) CALL NUMBER K87 .S87 1987 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Law Library Reading Room (Madison, LM242) - STORED OFFSITE

• Wikipedia -

  Richard Susskind
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Richard Susskind
  Susskindhighres.jpg
  Richard Susskind
  Born 28 March 1961 (age 55)
  Paisley, Scotland
  Residence United Kingdom
  Nationality British
  Fields Law
  IT
  Institutions Gresham College
  University of Oxford
  Strathclyde University
  Alma mater University of Glasgow
  Balliol College, Oxford
  Known for The Grid

  Richard Susskind OBE (born 28 March 1961) is a British author, speaker, and independent adviser to international professional firms and national governments. He is the IT Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, holds professorships at the University of Oxford,[1] Gresham College[2] and Strathclyde University,[3] is a past Chair of the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information and is the President of the Society for Computers and Law.

  Susskind has specialised in legal technology since the early 1980s, has authored 9 books and is a regular columnist at The Times newspaper.[4] Susskind has more recently furthered his research to cover the professions more generally and his latest book, co-authored with Daniel Susskind, his son,[5] predicts the decline of today's professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. They argue that the current professions are antiquated and no longer affordable and explain how 'increasingly capable systems' will fundamentally change the way that professional expertise is shared. They propose 6 models for producing and distributing expertise in society.[6]

  Contents

  1 Online dispute resolution
  2 Honours
  3 Fellowships
  4 Books
  5 References
  6 External links

  Online dispute resolution

  Susskind chairs the UK Civil Justice Council’s Advisory Group on Online Dispute Resolution, which published a report in February 2015 recommending the establishment of Her Majesty’s Online Courts (HMOC). The report recommends HMOC consist of 3 tiers, Online Evaluation, Online Facilitation and Online Judges. According to the report, the benefits of HMOC would be an increase in access to justice and substantial savings in the cost of the court system.[7]
  Honours

  1992 – Honorary Member, Society for Computers and Law
  2000 – OBE, for services to IT in the Law and to the Administration of Justice
  2001 – Honorary Fellow of Law Faculty, Durham University
  2005 – Honorary Professor, Gresham College, London
  Fellowships

  1992 – Fellow, Royal Society of Arts
  1997 – Fellow, Royal Society of Edinburgh
  1997 – Fellow, the British Computer Society
  Books

  Expert Systems in Law (Oxford University Press, 1987; paperback, 1989)
  Latent Damage Law – The Expert System (Butterworths, 1988) (with P.N. Capper)
  Essays on Law and Artificial Intelligence (Tano, 1993)
  The Future of Law (Oxford University Press, 1996; revised paperback, 1998)
  Transforming the Law (Oxford University Press, 2000; revised paperback, 2003)
  The Susskind Interviews (Sweet & Maxwell, 2005)
  The End of Lawyers? (Oxford University Press, 2008; revised paperback, 2010)
  Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future (Oxford University Press, paperback 2013)
  The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts (Oxford University Press, 2015) (with D. Susskind)

• Canadian Lawyer - http://www.canadianlawyermag.com/legalfeeds/3189/q-a-richard-and-daniel-susskind-on-the-future-of-law.html

  Q&A: Richard and Daniel Susskind on the future of law
  Written by David Dias Thursday, 31 March 2016

  Print E-mail Comments (1)

  Richard Susskind, one of the legal industry’s leading prognosticators, was in Toronto yesterday promoting his new book, The Future of the Professions. It prophesies a massive technological disruption in how expertise, legal and otherwise, is delivered.

  Daniel and Richard Susskind were in Toronto yesterday promoting his new book, The Future of the Professions. (Photo: David Dias)
  Daniel and Richard Susskind were in Toronto yesterday promoting his new book, The Future of the Professions. (Photo: David Dias)
  Susskind’s 2008 bestseller, The End of Lawyers?, sparked furious debate within the profession by suggesting that advanced systems could replace much of the work held to be within the exclusive domain of lawyers.

  This time, he and his son Daniel — himself: a senior adviser to the British government and an economist of some renown — are taking a broader look at the professions. The co-authors sat down with Legal Feeds before the book launch to talk about what the future holds for lawyers as advanced computer systems and artificial intelligence become a reality.

  Legal Feeds: Why should lawyers care about how different professions — teachers, accountants, and doctors — are using technology?

  Richard: What’s happening in law is happening right across the professions, and we can actually look at other professions and learn about what’s likely to happen in law — not least because law is more conservative than other professions, so we’ve got insight that we can gain from all of them . . . because they face the same challenges and because they’re a few years ahead.

  LF: Does that mean that these other professions can give lawyer a glimpse into what their future holds?

  Richard: By and large, I think it’s fair to say the legal profession is at the back of the professional groups in terms of uptake. But there’s nothing inherent in the nature of legal work that means that what’s happening in other professions shouldn’t also happen in law. . . . The major accounting firms are probably a decade ahead in some of their uses of technology. And while they weren’t competitors, that might not have been an issue, but they’re now direct competitors.

  LF: Will analyzing the technological evolution of these other professions give law firms the potential to avoid some of the turmoil?

  Richard: I think if you’re wanting to give your readers the hope of a soft landing, I think that would be to mislead them. . . . The looming nightmare, I suppose, for traditional lawyers is that an Amazon in law comes along and does to law what Amazon did to bookselling. My gut tells me it’s unlikely to unfold in as simple a way as that because the market is far more complex . . . but we should expect that large parts of legal practice will be done very differently, and that these new techniques are unlikely to come from the mainstream traditional providers.

  LF: So who are likely to lose their jobs? Secretaries? Paralegals? Associates?

  Daniel: One of the unhelpful things we do when we talk about the future of work is, we tend to talk about jobs. So we talk about traditional lawyers, legal secretaries, things of that sort. Why is that unhelpful? Because it encourages us to think of the work that professionals do as monolithic indivisible lumps of stuff, whereas in actual fact when you take any professional’s job and look under the bonnet, they perform lots of different tasks, lots of different activities in their job.

  LF: But certainly some of those activities can be done by a computer and some can’t, right?

  Daniel: Even for the most prestigious professionals, when you break down their work into their component tasks, it transpires that many of those tasks can be done differently — either by other people using technology or by technology alone. And this task-based approach, trying to recognize that professional work isn’t a lump of stuff of a given difficulty, and instead is composed of lots of different activities and tasks is I think quite an important thing to do.

  Richard: I think it’s pretty fair to say that a lot of the work of paralegals, a lot of the work of fairly junior lawyers, if you look at things like document review, that machines are now in some of the tasks they undertake outperforming them. But if because you’re a senior associate you think you’re safe, I think that would be a false level of comfort. . . . One’s career prospects we believe depends on one’s adaptability. If you think you’re going to carry on doing the work that an associate has always done, I think you’re going to be disappointed.

  LF: What’s timeline for this, 10 years, 20, 30?

  Richard: In the book we expressly say we are not pinning ourselves down to dates. . . . But we reckon that the ’20s is going to [be about] redeployment rather than unemployment, by which we mean, there’s a whole lot of new roles one needs to take on, a lot based on technology. Whether it be the knowledge engineer, the systems designer . . . but once one gets into the ’30s and ’40s, one can predict a more fundamental decline of the traditional professions.

  Daniel: It’s not the case that people are going to wake up tomorrow and find an algorithm sitting there and your job has been replaced by a robot. What we’ll see is tasks here and tasks there — a gradual change driven by technology. A relentless change but a gradual change.

  LF: Do you think the law societies will stand in the way of this change? There has to be some kind of professional regulation, doesn’t there?

  Richard: Do I think, though, that the professional bodies are likely to be major obstacles to some of this change? I think, for the general population, the answer is yes. . . . But it’s not professions or free-for-all. We can have other providers in the game, but being regulated in different ways. But, again, we want a task-based approach to this. Some tasks are so crucial that they require deep expertise and they require maximum client protection. Others are fairly routine and repetitive, and we think that, although they still need to be regulated to some extent, you don’t need the same severity of regime.

  LF: What do law firms need to be doing right now to prepare for the new reality?

  Richard: Often what lawyers want is what I call “off-the-shelf: competitive advantage.” They want to know what’s the answer really. But it’s really about thinking more fundamentally about issues such as market opportunity, differentiation, competitive advantage, all these notions that sound for most lawyers, I’m afraid, like management jargon — but they have very important applications. For the first time ever, law firms need to be able to engage in long- and short-term strategic planning. . . . As a firm, you need to allocate a group who think deeply about the way the market’s changing, the opportunities and threats that that throws up for you. You need to identify the markets you think you can have a sustainable offering in. You need to think about the ways you’re going to compete.

• Richard E. Susskind Home Page - http://www.susskind.com/

  Professor Richard Susskind OBE is an author, speaker, and independent adviser to major professional firms and to national governments. His main area of expertise is the future of professional service and, in particular, the way in which the IT and the Internet are changing the work of lawyers. He has worked on legal technology for over 30 years. He lectures internationally, has written many books, and advised on numerous government inquiries.

  Richard lectures internationally and has been invited to speak in over 40 countries and has addressed audiences (in person and electronically), numbering more than 250,000. He has written and edited numerous books, including Expert Systems in Law (OUP, 1987), The Future of Law (OUP, 1996), Transforming the Law (OUP, 2000), The Susskind Interviews: Legal Experts in Changing Times (Sweet & Maxwell, 2005), The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services (OUP, 2008), Tomorrow’s Lawyers (2013), and has written around 150 columns for The Times. His work has been translated into 10 languages.
  Read more of Richard’s biography

  He has advised on many government inquiries and, since 1998, has been IT Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. Richard is President of the Society for Computers and Law, Chair of the Online Dispute Resolution Advisory Group of the Civil Justice Council, and Chair of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute where he is also a Visiting Professor. He also hold professorships at UCL, Gresham College, London, and the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.

  Richard has a first class honours degree in law from the University of Glasgow and a doctorate in law and computers from Balliol College, Oxford. He has received numerous legal industry awards and is an Honorary Bencher of Gray’s Inn. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the British Computer Society, and was awarded an OBE in the Millennium New Year's Honours List for services to IT in the Law and to the Administration of Justice.

  He lives in Radlett, England, with his wife and three children. His hobbies include running, golf, skiing, reading and cinema.
  Independence

  Although Richard is self-employed and works independently, he does not claim to be a dispassionate analyst or to be free of commercial interests. His passion is the modernization of the practice of law and the administration of justice. His belief that the professions and justice systems should be modernized underpins most of his activities as an advisor and commentator.

  Richard’s work is not confined to the academic world and to advising in the public sector. He consults widely in the private sector, to major law firms and to large in-house legal departments. He has been an active member of an advisory board of Lyceum Capital, a private equity firm that is committed to investing in the legal profession; and he was chairman of the advisory board of Integreon, a legal and business process outsourcing business.

  Given his various roles, responsibilities, and interests, Richard is sensitive to conflicts that may arise, and he discusses these regularly with those with whom he works closely.

  Roles
  IT Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice

  Since 1998, Richard has been IT Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales.
  More
  President, Society for Computers and Law

  In March 2011, Richard Susskind succeeded Lord Saville as President of the Society for Computers and Law.
  More
  Chair, Advisory Board, Oxford Internet Institute

  In 2011, Richard succeeded Andrew Graham (formerly, Master of Balliol College, Oxford) as the Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at Oxford University. Since 2009, he has also been a Visiting Professor in Internet Studies at the OII.
  More
  Chair, Online Dispute Resolution Group of The Civil Justice Council

  On 25th April 2014, Richard was appointed Chair of an expert group whose remit was to explore the potential of online dispute resolution (ODR) for civil disputes of value less than £25,000. The Group’s first report (PDF) was published in February 2015 – and has strongly influenced judicial and government policy. (Download PDF)
  Honorary Professor, UCL Faculty of Laws

  Since November 2011, Richard has been an Honorary Professor of UCL in the Faculty of Laws.
  More
  Emeritus Gresham Professor of Law

  Richard is Emeritus Gresham Professor of Law at Gresham College, London. From 2000 to 2004, he was Gresham Professor of Law, and from 2004 to 2010 was the first Honorary Professor in the College since its establishment in 1597.
  More
  Professor, Law School, University of Strathclyde

  In 1990, Richard was the co-founder (with Professor Alan Paterson) of the Centre for Law, Computers and Technology at the Law School of the University of Strathclyde. At that time, aged 29, he was appointed Visiting Professor. He became a part-time, full professor in 2001 and continues to hold this position.
  More
  Chair, Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information (2003-2008)

  In April 2003, Richard was appointed by the Cabinet Office as the first Chair of a non-departmental public body, known as the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information or APPSI.
  More

  When first set up, APPSI was called the Advisory Panel on Crown Copyright. While Chair of APPSI, its terms of reference were:

  to advise Ministers on how to encourage and create opportunities in the information industry for greater reuse of Government information;
  to advise the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office about changes and opportunities in the information industry, so that the licensing of Crown copyright information is aligned with current and emerging developments; and
  to advise on the impact of the complaints procedures under the Information Fair Trader Scheme.

  The sponsor department of the Panel is now the Ministry of Justice. Richard completed his term as Chair in April 2008.

  Further details about the work of the Panel can be found at www.hmso.gov.uk/appsi.

  Richard's leadership of APPSI built on his experience as a member of the Modernising Government Project Board (run by the Cabinet Office, 1999-2001). It also dovetailed effectively with his membership, from 2003 until 2005, of the Freedom of Information Project Board at the then Department for Constitutional Affairs.

  Speaking Engagements

  Richard currently makes presentations (mainly keynote speeches) at about 100 conferences, seminars, retreats or other events each year and has been invited to lecture in more than 40 countries around the world.

  Inquiries as to his availability and rates can be made by e-mail to richard@susskind.com

  Richard has addressed audiences (in person and electronically), numbering more than 250,000.

  He has organized various international conferences, is a regular conference chairman and gives numerous major keynote addresses each year. When unable to attend in person, Richard regularly delivers his talks by video link, or on pre-recorded video or dvd, or as a multi-media e-learning presentation.

  He is also frequently invited to act as a facilitator and chairman of meetings.

  His speaking subjects include the future of law and legal services, the future of professional service, trends in IT and the Internet, strategy and business planning, the future of government, the future of education, IT strategy for major organizations, knowledge management, and e-business.
  Read more about Richard’s speaking engagements

  By way of example, as well as many keynotes at law firm partnership conferences, the following are some of the recent lectures he has given:

  Keynote Address - American Bar Association, National Summit, Stanford University (May, 2015)
  Plenary Lecture, Global Law Summit, London (February, 2015)
  Richard Davies Memorial Lecture, London (November, 2014)
  Keynote Address - Executive Lawyers' Thought Forum, Macau (Oct 2014)
  Keynote Address - A Celebration of Web Science, London (June 2014)
  Keynote Address - Reinvent Law, New York (Feb 2014)
  Larry Hoffman Distinguished Lecture, Miami Law (Oct 2013)
  Marshall Criser Distinguished Lecture, University of Florida (Sep 2013)
  Keynote Address - Law Tech Institute, Suffolk University, Boston (April 2013)
  Keynote Address – Law Via the Internet Conference, Cornell University (October 2012)
  Levitt Lecture 2012, University of Iowa (October 2012)
  Kelley Lecture 2012, University of Michigan (September 2012)
  Keynote Address – American Bar Association Conference for Deans of US Law Schools, Seattle, US (January 2012)
  Bracton Lecture, Exeter University, (November 2011)
  Keynote Address – Association Corporate Counsel Conference, Berlin (May, 2011)
  Keynote Address – LawWithoutWalls, Inaugural event, London (January 2011)
  Opening address – UCL Judicial Institute launch, London (November 2010)
  Keynote Address – Conference of International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution, New York (January 2010)
  Keynote Address - Canadian Bar Association Conference, Toronto (November 2009)

  Consulting Services

  Richard works with top managers, in the private and public sectors, in helping them to think clearly and make decisions confidently about the future, and to plan for the long term within their organizations.

  As an independent expert and thought leader, he brings fresh insight to clients, and acts as a catalyst in helping them drive forward their long term planning and implementation. He challenges in a way that is hard to do from the inside as a partner or employee. He advises his clients in a variety of ways.

  The following list indicates the various ways in which Richard helps his clients. He acts as:

  an adviser on likely and possible trends in the legal market, using a mix of his own ideas and techniques such as ‘blank-sheet thinking’;
  a sounding board (a coach of sorts) for those who run firms and practices within firms, helping them to focus on future trends and plans;
  a speaker at internal conferences, away-days, leadership training events, and training sessions generally; a researcher who undertakes studies of the views of clients;

  Read more about Richard’s consulting services

  a ghost writer or copy editor of articles and of speeches;
  as an external, non-executive member of firms’ boards and committees;
  as an advisor on the content and production of client events;
  as a mini R&D capability, scanning the horizon, monitoring successes amongst competitors and in other sectors, and evaluating the relevance of emerging technologies;
  as a source of new ideas and innovations; and
  as someone who helps future proof practice areas within firms, exploring how they plan to respond to new ways of sourcing legal work and to the impact of disruptive technologies.

  Additionally, Richard offers certain clients early sight of his own research and writings.

• Amazon -

  Professor Richard Susskind OBE is an author, speaker, and independent adviser to international professional firms and national governments. He is President of the Society for Computers and Law, IT Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice, and Chair of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute. He holds professorships at Oxford University, University College London, Strathclyde University, and Gresham College. He is the author of numerous books, including Tomorrow's Lawyers (OUP, 2013), The End of Lawyers? (2008), Transforming the Law (2000), The Future of Law (1996) and Expert Systems in Law (1987). His work has been translated into more than 10 languages, and he has been invited to speak in over 40 countries.

• Forbes - https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidparnell/2014/03/21/richard-susskind-moses-to-the-modern-law-firm/#4f4141323d94

  Mar 21, 2014 @ 11:01 AM 11,985 views
  The Little Black Book of Billionaire Secrets
  Richard Susskind: Moses To The Modern Law Firm

  David J. Parnell ,

  Contributor

  I help BigLaw partners switch law firms

  Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

  It wasn't but a minute into my conversation with Richard Susskind--author, professor, consultant, and most pertinent to our discourse, legal futurist--that I was transported in time; not forward, interestingly, but backward, revisiting a trip to a local veterinarian’s office in my younger years…

  My mother bred German Shepherds, and our very first went by the name of Mickey. Weighing in at 120 pounds, for a purebred, stud Shepherd, he was a massive specimen, and exemplified all of the great things that a dog of his ilk should: fiercely loyal, protective, gentle with children, loving to the family, and playful at just the right times. He was a great pet, and quickly became a part of the family. But eventually, I left for college, and he and I grew apart.

  Years passed, and as any pet owner knows, eventually Father Time comes to collect, and if death isn't natural, one final trip to the vet is inevitable. My parent’s bond with the dog was too strong. They couldn't bring themselves to put him down. And though I was away at college at the time, I was summoned to shoulder the burden. At that point in my life, inexperience with death and my distance from the dog--both literally and metaphorically--made me feel well suited to carry out his euthanasia. But on the drive to the vet, as I watched Mickey through the rear view mirror, lying down, panting faintly and taking in the light of his last day, reality washed over me. I wept.

  Though 20 years old at the time and a tough college football player, the gravity of such a fundamental thing as death was, unsurprisingly, too much for me to control. And as I carried what was the equivalent of a family member to the examination table, I found myself oddly comforted by the veterinarian’s voice. He was an older man, and I can’t forget the stark contrast between his white lab coat and tanned, weathered skin. Primarily a farm vet, he had been around the block more often that anyone cared to count. Death was a familiar visitor to his clinic, and to him, my trauma was little more than a day at the office. He was not without compassion, though, and as we spoke about the unfolding events, there was a calmness about him, an assuredness in his voice, a confidence that only experience and wisdom can bring. He carefully took Mickey from my hands, and for the first time since the ordeal began, my troubled mind found some desperately needed peace from his words.

  Flash forward twenty years, and I was having déjà vu. In a British-speckled, Scottish accent, and with an almost eerie exactitude, Richard Susskind was describing the current and impending realities of another fundamental and powerful thing: change. Specifically, we were discussing change in the legal industry, and with a calmness and precision that only a battle-tested industry veteran could exude, for the first time, in a long time, I came to see that for some law firms, the light at the end of tunnel is the sun, and not a train. And as Susskind delved deeper into the subject matter, much like my trip to the veterinarian’s office, I found a bit of peace.

  Having personally written a book about failed firms (due out in late April), I am terribly aware of the monsters that await the legal profession; a reality that will come to bear with or without permission from the legal Titans. Despite the clouds gathering on the horizon, much of today’s legal leadership stands steadfast, choosing riskily to meet the juggernaut head on. There is still hope, however, for those guardians of the industry that remain astute and flexible. Below are some of the more salient points of our conversation:
  On The Legal Services Act of 2007

  David: I'd like to begin with the Legal Services Act [of 2007]. Why do you think that more firms have not gone public in the UK?

  Richard: I'm not sure going public is the main issue or the main consequence of liberalization. What’s most interesting, I think, is the entry into the UK market of new entrepreneurial thinkers, new capital, and new service ideas, rather than injection of funds into old legal businesses. I'm clearly of the view that liberalization is a far greater interest to new potential players rather than the old.

  By and large, what we've seen is not really so much interest [in outside capital] amongst the leading firms, many of whom say they actually have sufficient capital for any of the investments they need to make. I question that because there are many projects that they would never imagine making because they don’t have sufficient funds for them. Of course they've got enough funds to fund what they currently do, but the bigger question is: Are there sufficient funds to fund what they have not yet imagined they might do?

  But as things stand, the major interest is amongst a small number of innovative, medium-sized firms, and more generally, new entrants to the market who are thinking of new ways of delivering legal services and real excitement to the market place. But why don’t the traditional legal firms go public is the question that’s often asked, and you're asking.

  [Organizations] that go public, often it’s in the interest of a small number of owners who want to benefit from it. But often, it’s a way, of course, of raising capital for major investments. I think it remains the case that most major law firms do not see the need for, or the scope for, major investment. The challenge there is they’re still thinking of their old business model.
  English: A photograph of Richard Susskind

  English: A photograph of Richard Susskind (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

  But, for example, an illustration I often give is banks that have been expressing an interest in coming together and undertaking compliance work through one service provider. So a project for a major law firm might be to set up a shared services center that might house hundreds of compliance specialists serving nearly a dozen investment banks. That is not the kind of investment that any law firm in the world could really comfortably afford on its own. But the point is, it’s not the kind of investment that any firm in the world is currently thinking of because they tend to be thinking, what is it we do today, that might benefit from greater funding, and because they haven’t got an answer to that, they then will tend to say, ‘The old model is working well enough.’

  It’s hard to convince a room full of millionaires that they've got their business model wrong. But it’s not obvious to them that they need the capital. Whereas I'm seeing, actually, if you rethink your business model, if you have radically innovative new ideas over the ways in which you might engage your clients or in which you might resource your delivery, then you will quite naturally see that you need new sets of people; you need new systems; you need to invest in processes; you need to set up perhaps a power plant or a factory to undertake the more routine work.

  Continued from page 1
  On the Biggest Strategic Issue Facing Modern Law Firms

  David: Associate ranks are shrinking, which is going to decrease leverage, and therefore, money coming in to the firm. Inherent to this is a particular class of partners that are being paid more than they are worth at this point. The reality of that is that as it stands today, there is a sizable group of any partnership that eventually isn't going to be making 6, 7, 8, or 9 hundred thousand, or a million dollars a year, anymore. With that in mind, what do you think is the biggest issue that firms face today?

  Richard: Possibly the biggest strategic issue facing any law firm in the world today is the extent to which they continue doing routine and repetitive, administrative, process-based work. What clients are saying is ‘we don’t mind paying law firms high fees for the difficult stuff, but on a big dispute, if you look at the document review exercise, or on a big deal, if you look at the due diligence exercise, we don’t really need expensive young people in expensive buildings in expensive cities doing this.’

  The question then arises: What is your alternative sourcing strategy? How, as a law firm, are you going to undertake that work? Because in England, we’re already seeing clients saying to top firms, ‘You do the difficult stuff and give the more routine work out to lower cost regional firms, or hand it over to legal process outsources, or use contract attorneys, or use a variety of technologies.’

  [So] it all depends on what you do with the bottom of the pyramid. For me, actually, if you get this right, if you set up your factory or process plant that is undertaking routine work in a different way, for some of them, that could be a great source of profit. I want to say that a law firm should have two businesses: advisory and process types of businesses. I know we [lawyers] didn't go to law school to set up a process business, but actually, that’s what clients want, and you need to think, do we do that ourselves, or do we let others do it? And I believe the firms that actually think deeply, do the process mapping, the process analysis, invest in the technology, invest in project management, they’re the ones who will be able to have a complementary business alongside their advisory business.

  The [new] advisory business is not nearly as well geared, or as well leveraged, as [the traditional model]. But, there could be a throughput in their process business that could more than compensate. Now, I don’t think all law firms can do that… but if they don’t, the publishers will, and the legal processes outsourcers will, and all the rest of it.

  But I'm not entirely pessimistic that legal businesses [can’t survive]. I think legal businesses can still be profitable, but they need to think more imaginatively about how they resource the bottom of the pyramid, and how they make money from the bottom of the pyramid. All of that said, it seems to be inevitable that the bottom of the pyramid will be subject to a great change, and many law firms will suffer [if they don’t strategically shift].
  On Differentiation and Competitive Advantage

  David: There are a number of firms who have very soundly planted themselves in the landscape and have a competitive advantage. They have a brand. I wouldn't say they're completely beyond reproach, but for all intents and purposes, they have earned a spot and it’s going to be very difficult to change that. With that being said, applying the 80/20 rule here, I have found--and it continues to surprise me--how few of these firms are able to articulate how they are different from their competitors. A few of them can’t even articulate who their actual competitors are. The revenue they’re still able to generate like this is unbelievable. This is very quickly coming to a halt, however, and I've seen the changes happening. I believe that there are going to be a number of other failed firms within the next few years. What are your thoughts?

  Richard: I agree with that, entirely. I think not being liberalized actually delays the amount of change. Because in the UK, you have new businesses like Riverview Law, which is partly owned by DLA Piper, coming to the market with a new proposition; not for legal process work, but for legal advisory outsourcing, [which hastens the change in the UK]. It’s typical with a new kind of competitor, whether or not they're an ABS (alternative business structure). There is an atmosphere in the UK of liberalization. There's an atmosphere that attracts more entrepreneurial thinking. What I believe [is that] in the US, it’s both feared and discouraged.

  I think it’s a competitive disadvantage in the United States because what you’ll see in liberalized regimes over the next few years are more impressive, more imaginative legal service providers, law firms, and more satisfied global legal clients which will give rise to general counsel wanting similar service from the US, and the US not being able to deliver, not having the capital resource, not having the innovation infrastructure, not having the capability to alternatively resource, and so forth.

  So it’s an electrifying issue. My prediction is that for 2020 in the US, there’ll be some substantial liberalization, because I think it is going to happen not federally, but on a state basis. 5 or 6 of the states I've visited have been talking precisely about that. It’s very hard to find anyone--even on the 20/20 commission [of the ABA]--who will defend the decision not to allow alternative business structures, and not to liberalize.
  On the Pressures on Middle-tier Firms

  David: [The pressures discussed so far] are a major problem for many second-tier firms; they don’t, and won't have a competitive advantage. At best, they have rainmaking partners that have good relationships. But, even those relationships are going by the wayside as general counsel become savvier; because they are being increasingly pulled out of large law firms, the value of the rainmaker’s relationship has taken a major, major hit. Even if you could call the relationships a competitive advantage--which they aren't--this further hamstrings the firm’s ability to get work in the near future, which could be a catastrophe if it’s held on to for too long. What are your thoughts?

  Richard: One of the transgressions in all of this, to frame it in a different way, is how much legal work is pricing-sensitive, and who gets that work? Because there are certain types of legal work--whether it be bet-the-ranch deals or bet-the-ranch disputes--where the work tends to gravitate to a limited number of outstanding brands, and it is often said that the fees charged by the law firms are neither here nor there in the broader context of the size of the deal or the size of the dispute.

  I recently gave a keynote to a big law firm leaders’ conference in New York. There were 3 law firm leaders [in particular], and the discussion focused on this issue, [and they said] ‘We get what you're saying, and it applies to second-tier firms, but leading firms have a ready supply of work that will always gravitate towards us, and the clients are not really that fussed for these very big deals and disputes--[about] how much they pay.’

  I think some things can be learned from that. I think one--and what you were saying yourself--is that those who are most threatened are those that are undifferentiated, second-tier firms who aspire perhaps to being in a higher tier, but struggle to convince the market that they have distinctive capabilities. And they are probably getting mid-market deals and medium sized disputes where, frankly, they are very price competitive. And if you have your pyramid structure in support of that work, for the reasons you suggested earlier, they’re under serious threat. So I'm in no doubt that these fairly large second-tier firms--from size 25-100 in the Am Law--they will all be under this considerable pressure.

  What's more debatable is the extent to which the other 25% are safe. The point I make is if one or two of these firms broke rank and actually still had their wonderful brand, but decided to set up the process part of the factory--in short, had a very compelling price proposition as well as a good brand--then that would radically change the game.

  It’s not yet happened, but my prediction is it will happen. It won't happen in the next few months, but it will happen in the next few years, where one or two pretty great firms will say, ‘We can put together a new proposition for the market which says not only do we have fantastic lawyers, but we also have an unbeatable pricing proposition,’ and that will both cause the other firms to rethink their strategy, and also, I think, really put greater pressure on the second-tier. I see it [all] likely unfolding by 2020.

  Continued from page 2
  One the Nature of Legal Work

  David: I think another question of interest--in listening to you talk--is how work much is bet-the-farm, and how much is not? I think a lot of the second tier firms think that they have bet-the-farm work, and it’s just not.

  Richard: I think you put your finger on a key point here, because my one view is that the market of price-insensitive work is actually smaller than most major leading firms would want us to believe, and secondly, I think it’s diminishing. There's another factor here, because when you think of what I call in my book, decomposition--and sometimes it’s called disaggregating--but when you break down work, even bet-the-ranch deals and disputes, you can say, ‘Okay, it’s absolutely mission critical, but we have 10 million documents to review, and shareholders have every right to expect that even though this is a terribly important case, that we’re still making sure that our work is done at a reasonable cost.’

  It seems to me that once you disaggregate, once you start breaking down work, then there's no such thing as a price insensitive dispute or deal; there's only price insensitive components of that deal.

  This is a vital point I don’t think many firms have quite grasped yet. So, if that’s happening in the UK--a major deal is being shared, as I mentioned earlier by a magic circle firm and a regional firm--the price insensitive component might be the bit that the magic circle firm is doing, but they've lost the bottom of the pyramid to another organization. So if you're a top-tier firm who thinks you can rely on price insensitive work, I think you're probably overstating the amount of work [there is] in that category. I think you should note that that category is probably reducing because of pricing pressures. And, inherently, once you start disaggregating or decomposing work, you'll find that a lot of your means of profitability is swept away in any event.
  On His Biggest Antagonists

  David: Do you have a prototypical antagonist within the firms that you consult with?

  Richard: There's not a single category, other than this: that the high performing partners in successful practice areas tend to be the ones who are the most vocal opponents. They fall into my category of: ‘It’s hard to come into a room full of millionaires that got their business model wrong.’ So if you have a very strong corporate practice, you'd be someone flying high, lots of deals coming through, clients prepared to pay on the old model; they say ‘Why on earth should we be rethinking the way we deliver our services.’

  I’d say it’s not a single practice, because sometimes it’s a real estate practice, sometimes it’s a dispute practice, sometimes a corporate practice. But, for perfectly understandable reasons, practice heads and partners who are trading well tend to be most skeptical about the need for change. There's no signage of a burning platform for them. But those who are under pressure--pricing pressure, competitive pressure, perhaps recruitment pressure--they find that my messages resonate more.
  On His Predictions For The Future

  David: Broadly speaking, what do you see for the future of BigLaw?

  Richard: There are three drivers of change in the profession: cost pressure, liberalization, and technology. The cost pressures are pretty overwhelming for clients just now. They’re saying to me they need to reduce the legal spending by 30-50%. They’re also saying we don’t mind paying for the experienced lawyers at the top of the pyramid; the law firms are going to have to rethink the bottom of the pyramid. I don’t think it’s going to change in the next two years. Probably over a period of 10 years we’ll see this change, but we’ll see a very different business structure emerging.

  My guess is there will be around 20 or so elite firms around the world that will still be immensely profitable because a lot of the work will still be price-sensitive and so forth. The second-tier firms around the world will really struggle because they've made a lot of their money from a broad-based pyramid. I can't see how you escape from that conclusion. I think many law firm leaders want to say it’s not going to happen as quickly as you think. That may be right. That maybe okay for the current leaders, but I don’t think it poses well for the next generation coming through.
  In Closing

  Even the most calloused thumb on the pulse of BigLaw can sense the state of flux. In the US, in particular, where unbundling was green-lighted in 2007, and recent economic pressures have finally charged clients with the horsepower to leverage it, there is a true issue at hand. While enough competition has squeezed in to affect bottom lines, there still isn't enough to spark--if I can quote Stephen Covey--a paradigm shift, yet. Because the UK, AU, and any other deregulated competition is being prodded along their evolutionary tracks much more aggressively, the US may be left exceedingly vulnerable to competition that can better meet future client demands.

  As with any institution facing adversity, two themes arise: recognition and remedy. Some firms are having difficulty recognizing, or more pointedly, accepting, that the storm clouds of full paradigm-level change are on the horizon. For the more sentient leaders, however, there is guidance: Susskind is the proverbial Moses for the forward-thinking, modern law firm, and two of his books in particular--The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services, and Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future--offer responsible leadership a view to an answer.

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
Barbara Kiser
527.7577 (Nov. 12, 2015): p163.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Nature Publishing Group
http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind Oxford University Press (2015)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Advances in digitization will soon obviate the need for doctors, teachers and lawyers. So write 'legal futurist' Richard Susskind and economist Daniel Susskind, arguing that the professions are unaffordable, antiquated and opaque. Analysing how the algorithmic juggernaut is forcing the decomposition of traditional careers, the authors propose six new professional models--such as "knowledge engineers"--that together form a non-alarmist vision of how "increasingly capable" machines could help to redistribute expertise.

Kiser, Barbara
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kiser, Barbara. "The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts." Nature, vol. 527, no. 7577, 2015, p. 163. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA434515537&it=r&asid=bf39e412093f0ceec837a25ffa66e4ef. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A434515537
Susskind, Richard: The future of the professions: how technology will transform the work of human experts
A. Dantes
53.10 (June 2016): p1492.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Quoted in Sidelights: this book should be shared and discussed among students and all professionals in all different industries.
Susskind, Richard. The future of the professions: how technology will transform the work of human experts, by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind. Oxford, 2016. 346p bibl index ISBN 9780198713395 cloth, $29.95; ISBN 9780191022401 ebook, contact publisher for price

(cc) 53-4357

QA76

MARC

This book thoughtfully explores the future of professional work and the people who do it. The proclamations that certain professions are dead or dying because of the increasing prevalence of technology have been many and varied. But Richard Susskind, consultant and author, e.g., Tomorrow's Lawyers (2013) and The Future of Law (CH, Jun'97, 34-5916), and Daniel Susskind (economics, Balliol College, Univ. of Oxford, UK) do a good job uniting all the professions and the idea of professionalism under one banner, and they explore what technology has in store for the future of all of them. What the book does best is present the case that professionals should turn inward and examine the true value of their expertise. By defining the underlying assumptions that connect all professions and systematically deconstructing their worth to society at large, the authors craft an intriguing look at a future where professional work is more accessible to the masses and perhaps less valuable. Though it is too broad and unspecific at times, ultimately this book should be shared and discussed among students and all professionals in all different industries. Summing Up: ** Recommended. All library collections.--A. Dantes, Florida International University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dantes, A. "Susskind, Richard: The future of the professions: how technology will transform the work of human experts." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1492. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942768&it=r&asid=e07de3a25cb39d43dd9a0a5073573548. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942768
Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future
Sheila M. Blackford
39.4 (July-August 2013): p38.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Bar Association
http://www.abanet.org
Quoted in Sidelights: essential reading for moving forward in a changing legal landscape.

Being Law Practice's editor-in-chief has its privileges. Among others, I got to read Professor Richard Susskind's great lead article before you. But that just wasn't enough: I wanted more. I wanted it now. A quick search and I had it delivered immediately to my Kindle. No heading off to Portland's readers' mecca, Powell's City of Books, or waiting two days with Amazon's one-click shopping. It's great being one of tomorrow's readers.

I confess to hanging out, captivated by Tomorrow's Lawyers, rather than doing much else, as I find Susskind's voice as engaging as his thoughts. In this book, he identifies where to go and what to look for as we attempt to find our places in the new landscape of the legal profession and justice system. A warning, though: This is not a book to begin the night before you have early appointments.

Here are some of Susskind's points that piqued my interest:

"There is a profound message here for lawyers--when thinking about IT and the Internet, the challenge is not just to automate current working practices that are not efficient. The challenge is to innovate, to practise law in ways that we could not have done in the past."

"There is something of a perfect storm here. Liberalization and information technology on their own would bring (and enable) reform but it is the more-for-less challenge, this imperative driven by grim economic conditions, that is and will continue to be the dominant force."

"If my first major point in this book is that the legal market faces the more-for-less challenge, then my second is that legal work can be decomposed and sourced in new and different ways."

"I claim that there are at least 13 disruptive technologies in law. Individually, these existing and emerging systems will challenge and change the way in which certain legal services are delivered. Collectively, they will transform the entire legal landscape."

"To run a successful legal business in the future, therefore, it will not be sufficient for lawyers to be in possession of fine legal minds. Tomorrow's lawyers will need to acquire various softer skills if they are to win new clients and keep them happy."

Are you ready for the challenge? Can you embrace the unfolding future and build a law practice that is viable and sustainable? Will you take your place as one of tomorrow's lawyers? What lies ahead may be found in Susskind's latest book, Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future, which is essential reading for moving forward in a changing legal landscape. So what are you waiting for? Get reading!

Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future

Published by the University of Oxford Press

Blackford, Sheila M.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Blackford, Sheila M. "Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future." Law Practice, July-Aug. 2013, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA336491086&it=r&asid=89fcc8a634d18b91d4c84fcae8d23d07. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A336491086
The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services
84.5 (May 2010): p45.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Florida Bar
http://www.floridabar.org

The End of Lawyers? By Richard Susskind

In The End of Lawyers?, author and professional adviser Richard Susskind evaluates the legal profession in light of the current economic climate. His findings raise serious questions about the future of both legal services and the legal practice as a whole.

Susskind argues against expensive legal services, which he believes the new market will no longer tolerate. Many services, Susskind believes, could be undertaken more efficiently and less expensively. Unless attorneys begin to adjust their way of doing things, Susskind believes tasks once immediately given to lawyers will be accomplished via other, less expensive means.

According to Susskind, in the notso-distant future, the legal profession will be driven by a pull toward the commoditization of legal services and the development of new legal technologies.

To meet these coming challenges, The End of Lawyers? suggests law professionals become more entrepreneurial and willing to adapt to new methods. Susskind encourages attorneys to remain openminded to a changing legal world, and he includes in his book suggestions to adapt to the impending changes.

With eight chapters discussing commoditization and technology trends, The End of Lawyers? is set to become a helpful handbook for lawyers transitioning into the future.

The End of Lawyers?, 303-pp., is published by Oxford University Press and is available online (www.oup.com) for $50.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services." Florida Bar Journal, May 2010, p. 45+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA227597621&it=r&asid=9bfeaa6a60fb9076e3c1b9a72780cb9d. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A227597621
The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services
Thomas H. Koenig
45.10 (Oct. 2009): p53.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 American Association for Justice
http://www.justice.org/cps/rde/xchg/justice/hs.xsl/4938.htm
Quoted in Sidelights: Even if Susskind overestimates the degree to which technological progress will change the legal profession in the near future, The End of Lawyers? is very much worth reading; it is well written and filled with thought-provoking insights,

The End of Lawyers?

Rethinking the Nature

of Legal Services

Richard Susskind

Oxford University Press

www.oup.com/us

303 pp., $50 cloth

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In July, the dean of Miami Law School warned potential enrollees that "in these uncertain and challenging times, the nature of the legal profession is in great flux. It is very difficult to predict what the employment landscape for young lawyers will be in May 2012 and thereafter."

Miami's dean was echoing the career services office of Harvard Law School, which recently advised its first- and second-year students: "Almost every day, there is news of law firms laying off attorneys, delaying start dates, freezing salaries, and, in some cases, even rescinding offers. ... Now is not the time for avoidance, denial, or panic. Instead, keep a cool head and focus on the things that you can control."

If Richard Susskind, IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales and emeritus professor of law at London's Gresham College, is correct, these warnings are early symptoms of a radical transformation in the nature of legal services. Susskind predicts that law firms will be forced by Internet-savvy clients to replace many of their current high-profit, individualized services with standardized, systematized, packaged, and even commoditized legal work products.

Although many of the changes that Susskind predicts are already emerging, he envisions them fully developed and interacting in a way that will dramatically change how law is practiced. Newly minted lawyers will find fewer job openings as law firms develop complex, just-in-time legal-services supply chains based on the logistics techniques developed by globalized manufacturers. Law firms will economize by outsourcing work to low-wage countries, leasing part-time employees such as stay-at-home mothers during periods of peak workload, employing nonlawyers for both routine and multidisciplinary tasks, and assembling temporary teams of specialists rather than bringing young associates up to speed.

In the near future, Suss kind argues, computers will perform most of the routine, repetitive aspects of legal work. Already, algorithms that can break down legal experts' knowledge into automated decision trees are being employed in high-volume tasks in debt collection, residential conveyancing, and some routine personal injury cases. Work-flow technology, tailored to a client's particular fact pattern, will increasingly be used to mechanically create the correct legal documents from among millions of possible permutations, Susskind writes.

Future clients will insist on receiving frequent online updates on the law firm's efforts and will demand access to their attorneys at any time of day or night. The "Net Generation"--those who have grown up communicating through MySpace and Facebook, interacting on Second Life, and downloading songs over iTunes--will expect their legal work to be contracted, coordinated, and shared in virtual space. Internet conferences and settlement negotiations inevitably will replace many face-to-face interactions.

Law schools need to evolve to produce the legal practitioners of this technologically sophisticated future. Learning environments that employ multimedia formats with memorable graphics can replace dry lectures. Webcasts and interactive "telepresence" can provide virtual courtroom and negotiation experiences under the guidance of leading specialists. Classes that deal with the legal dilemmas created by technological change will need to be enriched.

Trial lawyers will be heartened by Susskind's discussion of the potential impact of IT on the "latent legal market" of injured people who currently fail to pursue their right to legal redress. Dramatically more effective search engines will empower them by providing access to easily accessible legal information in user-friendly formats.

Injured parties will be apprised of their lawful options and motivated to seek out legal representation after reading about others' personal experiences. They will be able to visit online discussion forums dealing with their situation, obtain copies of necessary documents online, and read timely legal updates and scholarly commentaries on the Web. Trial lawyers will employ increasingly sophisticated technological mechanisms to locate and assemble class actions, and they will develop a form of online triage: a series of questions about the injury that will help them provide potential clients with legal guidance.

Former clients will rate their degree of satisfaction with various sources of legal advice on consumer evaluation Web sites. Price comparisons among potential legal representatives will become far easier for clients. Nimble and visionary attorneys will prosper in this turbulent environment, while those who stick to traditional business models will struggle to survive.

Due to rapid advances in IT, the sole practitioner soon will have extensive access to outside expertise and standard documents, checklists, and procedures through the Web. Attorneys who face similar legal challenges will use the Internet to create coalitions that share legal knowledge and work product through closed legal communities, open Web sites, and wikis. Legal research will be divided into discrete tasks that will be coordinated, assembled, and shared online.

Timely insights and advice on litigation will be provided by blogging law professors and practitioners rather than buried in lengthy law review articles that may take years to appear. Online dispute resolution, social networking, instant messaging, collaborative work spacing (working together in an online work space), and litigation support systems will help level the playing field for individual attorneys who face well-funded corporate opponents.

Susskind admits that visionaries often misread the future and that his earlier predictions have not always been perfect. However, his track record in both foreseeing and shaping legal practice has been impressive.

Even if Susskind overestimates the degree to which technological progress will change the legal profession in the near future, The End of Lawyers? is very much worth reading; it is well written and filled with thought-provoking insights. After all, we are all interested in the future because, as the inventor Charles Kettering once noted, we expect to be living the rest of our lives there.

Thomas H. Koenig is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and a founding member of the Law, Policy, and Society Ph.D. program at Northeastern University in Boston.

Koenig, Thomas H.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Koenig, Thomas H. "The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services." Trial, Oct. 2009, p. 53+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA238558774&it=r&asid=fee2a53aad6d69f54162f45cb32a9bbc. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A238558774
The Future of Law: Facing the Challenges of Information Technology
Frances Webber
38.3 (January-March 1997): p102.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1997 Sage Publications, Inc.
http://rac.sagepub.com/

By RICHARD SUSSKIND (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996) 309pp. 19.99 [pounds sterling]

Imagine a society where law was accessible, easy to understand, not mediated through expensive textbooks or experts. The citizens of that society would be better informed, more able to demand their rights, more critical, more participative. In a word, it would be a more democratic society.

So claims Richard Susskind, a visionary whose book is a paean to Information Technology (IT). Straddling the worlds of computing and law, he tells how the new technology will transform law from an arcane and jealously guarded body of knowledge subject to endless protracted debate on legal minutiae, by bringing it, in a comprehensible form, potentially to all, with lawyers acting as information providers rather than expensive advisers.

First, Susskind analyses some of the defects of the law at present. There is too much of it; primary and secondary legislation rain down incessantly from parliament and from government departments, with secondary legislation increasing by 600 per cent between 1980 and 1991. It is obscure; in Britain, the law is not promulgated and, despite the overregulation, we have to go to Her Majesty's (now privatised) Stationery Office and buy the law (ignorance of which is no defence) if we want to know what it is. It is over-complicated, with Acts and statutory instruments proliferating in a welter of incomprehensible cross-referring sub-paragraphs. It is difficult enough for lawyers, never mind laymen, to keep up to date with the law, and to understand it as it grows.

Yet the law is embedded in our daily lives. At home, at work, shopping and on the street, legal issues can arise. Faulty goods or services, liability for house repairs, debts, working conditions, contact with the police, all involve the law. Most people wouldn't dream of consulting a lawyer for most everyday transactions, including signing hire purchase agreements, buying expensive goods, starting a new job or renting property. Only when it comes to buying or selling a house, making a will or trouble with the police do lawyers come unwelcome to mind. But, says Susskind, if the law were accessible to all in an understandable way, this `latent legal market' would invite a far wider legal input, and legal knowledge would play a preemptive or pro-active role, rather than, as at present, a fire-brigade one.

For this to happen, Susskind says, lawyers must think of themselves increasingly as information providers to the many, rather than one-to-one advisers. They will need to formulate and develop packages such as legal checklists for consumers and contractors, variable contract clauses for employers, and information packages which allow users easy access to the law in, for example, product liability.

Technology enables this in a variety of ways, the most important of which are intelligent searching (to find our way through masses of irrelevant material by the use of keywords or phrases) and hypertext. Hypertext changes the way we read. Its use organises materials on computer (in, for example, the World Wide Web), so that the user can `click on' a portion of text to enter another `layer' of text, which amplifies or explains the first text, or provides a fink. Applied to law, hypertext enables statutes to be `annotated' so that the reader can access interpretive materials, caselaw and regulations arising out of any section. In more sophisticated applications, hypertext enables users to be guided through entire packages of law relevant to their particular problem; housing rights for homeless people, for example, or the rights of debtors, or entitlement to particular welfare benefits in particular circumstances.

These are not the author's examples, but mine. His examples are drawn from the world of commercial law, involving varieties of construction and employment contracts and liability for latent defects in construction. And therein lies the paradox of the book. His brave new world is one in which the English legal system becomes `competitive in the international market place, offering a cost-effective and high-quality forum for the resolution of disputes'. His aim is to wake English lawyers to the `emerging challenges of the international business world'.

So, if what the author is advocating is the commodification of law, packaging legal information with an eye to capturing the `latent legal market' and enhancing British legal competitiveness, how relevant or useful is it to those on benefits, with no work? How can this market-driven revolution in law lead to greater democracy? So far, the exploitation of IT has overwhelmingly been for purposes ancillary to capitalism. It is no coincidence that 75 per cent of all Internet users are corporate.

True, technology creates opportunities for improved communication to opposition groups: witness the Zapatistas' famous use of the Internet, and its use by trade unions in Bangladesh to support strikers. Closer to home, the Net has been mobilised by the McLibel Two and their supporters, to create a database and messageboard system providing support for the two against the might of McDonalds. An electronic information network in immigration law for advisers and CABx represents early, faltering steps in the use of technology on behalf of a non-corporate sector.

But while IT will certainly improve citizens' access to law and iron out some of law's inefficiencies and delays, what it cannot do -- what no market-driven revolution can do -- is to enhance substantive justice. No amount of information technology can change the power relations between those on whose behalf law is made and those who have to obey it, or make law more responsive to human needs -- or more just. It is the international capital whose disputes Susskind wants to service more efficiently which creates injustice on a global scale. There can be no greater democracy while such injustice flourishes; only the benefits of greater efficiency.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Webber, Frances. "The Future of Law: Facing the Challenges of Information Technology." Race and Class, vol. 38, no. 3, 1997, p. 102+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA19159544&it=r&asid=6e52c333b3e28355b54944ac101a07d9. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A19159544

Kiser, Barbara. "The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts." Nature, vol. 527, no. 7577, 2015, p. 163. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA434515537&asid=bf39e412093f0ceec837a25ffa66e4ef. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017. Dantes, A. "Susskind, Richard: The future of the professions: how technology will transform the work of human experts." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1492. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA454942768&asid=e07de3a25cb39d43dd9a0a5073573548. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017. Blackford, Sheila M. "Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future." Law Practice, July-Aug. 2013, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA336491086&asid=89fcc8a634d18b91d4c84fcae8d23d07. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017. "The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services." Florida Bar Journal, May 2010, p. 45+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA227597621&asid=9bfeaa6a60fb9076e3c1b9a72780cb9d. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017. Koenig, Thomas H. "The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services." Trial, Oct. 2009, p. 53+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA238558774&asid=fee2a53aad6d69f54162f45cb32a9bbc. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017. Webber, Frances. "The Future of Law: Facing the Challenges of Information Technology." Race and Class, vol. 38, no. 3, 1997, p. 102+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA19159544&asid=6e52c333b3e28355b54944ac101a07d9. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.

• Prospect
  http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/are-only-poets-safe-book-review-the-future-of-the-professions-richard-susskind-daniel-susskind-robotisation
  Word count: 1743

  Quoted in Sidelights: helps us to recognise the professions’ current methods as convoluted, self-serving rituals designed to wrap simple tasks in mystique. Their practitioners do this to enjoy the same power over the rest of us that the first scribes exercised over the wondering illiterates around them. Better, surely, for everyone to learn how to read.
  Are only poets safe from robots?
  Could lawyers and doctors soon be replaced by robots?
  by Giles Wilkes / December 10, 2015 / Leave a comment

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  Published in January 2016 issue of Prospect Magazine
  The iCub humanoid robot at IDSIA's robotics lab in Switzerland ©Juxi

  The iCub humanoid robot at IDSIA’s robotics lab in Switzerland ©Juxi

  The Future of the Professions: How Technology will Transform the Work of Human Experts, by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, Oxford University Press, £18.99

  Four years ago, a poem called “For the Bristle- cone Snag” found its way into the Archive, a student magazine published at Duke University in the United States. Containing the less-than-immortal lines, “They attacked it with mechanical horns because they love you, love, in fire and wind,” the nine-line stanza appears to muse on the destruction of a tree. There is a reason for the poem’s clumsiness: it was written by a computer algorithm, created by an undergraduate curious to see how artificial intelligence could create something as inherently human as poetry.

  On the evidence of “For the Bristlecone Snag” it is too soon to predict when the TS Eliot Prize will be won by a robot. But elsewhere, few occupations can rest easy. Resistance is not so much futile as economically bad form. Ever since the Luddite machine-breaking rebellion 200 years ago, a key part of every economist’s training has been to learn to scoff at technophobes. Machine efficiency allows resources to go further so what does it matter if workers are displaced? An evolving economy generates new uses for their labour, usually tasks that are less grimy and repetitive than before. Of course it is better to be the person who invents or owns the machine than a worker who suddenly finds he or she is surplus to requirements. But these distributional trembles should be dealt with by the political class, not economists.

  As miners have been replaced by coal-cutting machines and bank clerks by computerised ledgers, this complacency has held firm. But the latest, information-centred, phase of industrial revolution has a more unnerving character. The replacement of human labour by machines was supposed to hit a limit. At some point, routine tasks such as scanning warehouse inventory evolve into the less routine, such as deciding a marketing strategy or designing an undergraduate course. Beyond this limit, there is meant to be a space where mankind’s skills remain irreplaceable, securely remunerated and with the humans still firmly in charge.

  But perhaps not. That is the most dramatic argument one might take from The Future of the Professions by Richard and Daniel Susskind, a father and son team. Their view is that what once hit cloth weavers and miners, and is now happening to cashiers and travel agents, will eventually sweep up the advanced professions. The traditional ways of working currently enjoyed by lawyers and doctors will be broken and revolutionised. This will happen through the encroachment of open IT systems and ever more capable artificial intelligence, able to make the sort of fine judgements—including those with a moral angle—that currently rely on experienced human beings.

  Read more:

  Is technology set to steal your job?

  Capital punishment: why new technologies are hurting us (for now)

  This is a bold book, not least because of its target. Despite 30 years of the information revolution, trades such as law, medicine and accountancy have remained well beyond the grasp of ordinary people, and protected from the market forces wearing away at many other industries. Contrast this with a more thoroughly disrupted industry, the media, which has seen explosive growth in consumer choice. Why should any vocation have a protective wall thrown around it? More than an audacious stab at futurology, this makes the authors’s argument an act of delicious iconoclasm.

  Many will find this hard to swallow. Law, medicine, architecture and education are built on human expertise. They demand years of training and require a level of trust that can only exist between human beings. For a medical diagnosis or legal opinion one needs not just data processing but judgement, empathy and imagination. Those who reach the peak of their profession correspond to Arthur Schopenhauer’s definition of genius: not merely hitting the mark that others cannot hit, but hitting one that no one else can see.

  “Eighteen years have passed since Deep Blue, an IBM computer, beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Now Kasparov would struggle to beat your iPhone”

  Law, accountancy and medicine also enjoy a level of social influence that cannot be explained merely by an appreciation of their skill. Most have evolved as closed shops, demanding specific learning and credentials. The economist would describe this in terms of monopoly power: leading lawyers, consultants and accountants are richly rewarded for their scarcity. The Susskinds put it more grandly: “The professions are at the heart of our social and working lives… Their practitioners save our lives and keep us in good health, they educate our children, counsel and enlighten us spiritually, advise us on our legal entitlements, manage our money, assist us in running our businesses, help us complete our tax returns, design our homes, and much more.”

  I find two strong claims of the authors easy to believe, and a third that still awaits proof. The first is that the relentless onward march of information technology is bound to result in computer systems with abilities that rival or even exceed those of advanced professionals—although the authors wisely do not put a date on this. The second is that this is clearly desirable and good for welfare. But whether this should happen just because it can is another matter altogether.

  Technological improvement is theoretically limitless. Eighteen years have passed since Deep Blue, an IBM computer, beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Since then, as Moore’s law has predicted, computer processing power has doubled every 18 months; now Kasparov would struggle to beat your iPhone. Four years ago, IBM’s Watson beat two of the greatest champions ever to play Jeopardy!, an American television game show demanding erudition and lateral thinking. Watson’s method was brutal: load up terabytes of unstructured data, apply probabilistic algorithms and spit out an answer. If this is what could be achieved in 2011, it is easy to foresee a time when, as the Susskinds put it, “future systems could articulate and balance moral arguments, identify consistencies and illogicalities, point out assumptions and presuppositions… and identify conclusions.”

  The human brain is still the most complicated structure in the universe, each of its 80bn neurons connected to 10,000 others. A typical objection is that zeros and ones can never realise human-like thought. But computerising professional work does not demand a silicon version of a human professional. In the words of one journalist, Watson won its game without “knowing” that it won.

  Finding new solutions to problems is a neat summary of what technological progress means. That such progress benefits us is the reason to welcome this next stage of disruption. Superficially, professionals appear willing to buy into the information revolution and the tools it has brought. Lawyers accept emailed documents and court appearances by video link. Higher education is being revolutionised by online learning through massive open courses.

  But it is too early to extrapolate such improvements into a future in which the machines take over the decision-making role of humans. As a feat of futurology, this book could have benefited from a more sceptical take on how monopolies evolve to shield themselves from the forces that threaten them. The Susskinds set out a model for the evolution of professional work in which the last stage is “externalisation,” where the deep practical knowledge of the professions is released to the commons. Knowledge wants to be free, and market forces will drive it that way. Yet, as they acknowledge, professions also show a profound reluctance to share. This is understandable. A legal firm does not spend years accumulating an understanding of specialist law only to give it away.

  As the authors themselves observe, professions do not only compute and evaluate, but also take moral responsibility: “We want another human being to have reflected, and perhaps agonised, over decisions and advice that matter to us.” But this responsibility brings the possibility of power, which can be used to resist certain ways of working. Consulting a gigantic database of legal documentation may come cheap. Generating an opinion will not.

  Also, by attempting to sweep up all the professions into one view the authors lose the ability to distinguish between how each of them might respond to the challenge and opportunity. Accountancy, law and medicine are not only technologically different, but enjoy differential access to market and state power. The weavers and spinners displaced 200 years ago had little choice in the matter. Other products resist this, and some forms of professional service will pull off this trick better than others. Lawyers are to some extent responsible for the rules they follow, whereas medics and architects need to master the laws of physics and biology, which can presumably be grasped by super-advanced machines.

  The Future of the Professions is not an easy read. For a work produced by two real humans, it is strangely bloodless in style, enumerating positions and counter-positions like medieval scholastics debating the divine. Sometimes I wished there was a machine to read the book for me.

  But this dry argumentation does nothing to detract from the audacity of their thesis. The Future of the Professions helps us to recognise the professions’ current methods as convoluted, self-serving rituals designed to wrap simple tasks in mystique. Their practitioners do this to enjoy the same power over the rest of us that the first scribes exercised over the wondering illiterates around them. Better, surely, for everyone to learn how to read.

• New Scientist
  https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28437-professionals-your-time-is-up-prepare-to-be-sidelined-by-tech/
  Word count: 1286

  Quoted in Sidelights: “This debate is not about what’s best for you,” Richard Susskind warned an increasingly agitated audience of professionals at University College London’s Kennedy Theatre last week, at an event to mark the book’s release. “It’s about what’s attractive for recipients.”
  the debate we must have before it is too late should centre on where we place the moral boundaries.
  Professionals, your time is up, prepare to be sidelined by tech

  A new book, The Future of the Professions, argues that machines will soon do the work of lawyers, doctor and others. Should babies be delivered by robots?
  Professionals, your time is up, prepare to be sidelined by tech

  By Pat Kane and Gilead Amit

  “Computer says ‘no’.” Let’s hand it to the BBC’s cult comedy Little Britain and its grumpy creation Carol Beer, who was fond of quoting computer “judgements” on matters she could easily have decided on herself. With cruel precision, it laid bare our cultural nerve ends about the dangers of too much automation in the expert services we seek.

  We would struggle to call Carol Beer a “professional” in the same vein as the ones Richard and Daniel Susskind discuss in their new book The Future of the Professions. But empathy – the capacity to read another human sensitively, the root of our moral compass – is one of the few aspects of professional roles the Susskinds imagine might survive “incremental transformation” by information technology.

  Brought together, the Susskinds (Richard the father and Daniel the son) are particularly well placed to comment. Daniel, currently lecturing in economics at Balliol College at the University of Oxford and Richard, a recent Cabinet advisor, bring a first-principles (and historical) approach to the question of why we need professionals in the first place.

  Faced with legal issues, health challenges, educational needs, financial complexities, and the building and engineering of their environment, the citizens of the Middle Ages couldn’t possibly know what was required to make informed decisions. The professions – lawyers, doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, engineers and so on – emerged to answer this need, with what the Susskinds stress is their common offer: “practical expertise”.

  Today, information networks are providing access to such expertise while radically bypassing the professional gatekeeper, in ways that make clients feel more personally empowered.

  Thus we turn up at our doctor’s with more web-collated information on our persistent leg wound than a field paramedic. If search engines struggle to turn up the answers we seek, we find the solution ourselves in a jungle of user forums where we interpret and judge the practical opinions of others. This amounts to the devolution of a classic professional competence.

  And if all this cyber-centricity puts irreparable strain on our relationships, we can kick off divorce proceedings by formulating the relevant legal documents online – completing the routine tasks with what might be, under the circumstances, a welcome impersonality.
  Dispute resolution

  Already eBay’s software resolves 60 million disputes per year without the involvement of a single lawyer – more than 40 times the number of civil cases registered annually in the courts of England and Wales.

  And more students sign up for Harvard’s online courses in a single year than have ever attended its Massachusetts campus. The Vatican has even launched an official app to help sinners prepare for confession (though with the usual proviso that it is no substitute for the real thing).

  “This debate is not about what’s best for you,” Richard Susskind warned an increasingly agitated audience of professionals at University College London’s Kennedy Theatre last week, at an event to mark the book’s release. “It’s about what’s attractive for recipients.”

  By the time the distinguished panel assembled for the event was due to speak, the mood resembled that of the proverbial turkey farm recently privy to the true significance of Christmas. But the panellists’ confidence in the uniqueness of their individual cases was undimmed.

  Michael Briggs, a judge in the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, welcomed the efficiency that machines could bring to the legal profession, but stressed that clients would never choose a smart computer program over a lawyer with moral principles at heart. And David Lomas, who leads UCL’s School of Medical and Life Sciences, asserted with equal confidence that machines could never match the relationship of trust patients require from their physicians.

  Given the increasingly high costs of accessing legal assistance and the unavoidably high false diagnosis rates among doctors, one cannot help but wonder whether the public truly shares the concerns over technology that some so readily attribute to them.

  As the professionals in the audience piled in with increasingly frantic justifications of their own indispensability, the authors’ frustration was palpable. When one doctor took to the floor to say that machines would never be able to deliver babies, Richard Susskind cut in to explain it was no longer a question of whether they could encroach into such sensitive areas, but whether or not they should.
  Moral boundaries

  Instead, the debate we must have before it is too late should centre on where we place the moral boundaries. Should a robot judge ever be given authority to pass a death sentence, or a digital physician advise a family on when to pull the plug on their relative’s life support system?

  The unusually patient explanations in The Future of The Professions give a sense of the official pushback the authors have encountered. Richard Susskind recalls being censured by the UK Law Society for “bringing the legal profession into disrepute”. His crime? A mid-1980s prediction that email would become a natural medium for lawyer-client relations.

  As creator of the world’s first commercially available “expert” legal software in 1988, the elder Susskind loves the current renaissance of applied AI. In a world where a new medical paper is published every 41 seconds, the vast data-crunching of “learning-machines” such as IBM’s Watson or Google’s DeepMind could not just provide a safety check for the judgements of human professionals, but also make fresh diagnoses.

  The Susskinds foresee the professions “decomposed” into their various tasks and scattered across new divisions of labour like “process analysts”, “knowledge engineers” and “system providers”. “Quasi-trust” is all that would be required for open networks of expertise shaped by reputation and ratings to flourish: think eBay, Airbnb or Uber.

  In this new compact of digital access, DIY enthusiasm and ever-smarter machines, human professionals are no longer the “sage on the stage” but the “guide on the side”. No doubt the traditional credentialing (and occupational ego) of the lawyer, doctor or teacher will have to change.

  The writers leave a meaty role for “craftspersons” – those professionals whose rare talent and sensibility can still surpass the capabilities of the coming matrix – though in a scenario where AI is embedded throughout our social exchanges, it’s hard to see how they’ll be anything other than relics.

  If she took empathy classes, Carol Beer could still draw a para-professional wage in the coming years. But she might also have to hear what her devices are actually telling her. “Computer says: ‘Shall we?'”

  Image credit: Floris Leeuwenberg/The Cover Story/Corbis

  The Future of the Professions: How technology will transform the work of human experts

  Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind

  Oxford University Press

• LSE Review of Books
  http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/02/02/book-review-the-future-of-the-professions-how-technology-will-transform-the-work-of-human-experts-by-richard-and-daniel-susskind/
  Word count: 1261

  Quoted in Sidelights: an effectively constructed argument
  the real question is whether the benefits outweigh the loss of the professions to creative destruction.
  accessible to a broad audience yet theoretically grounded

  Book Review: The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind
  blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/02/02/book-review-the-future-of-the-professions-how-technology-will-transform-the-work-of-human-experts-by-richard-and-daniel-susskind/
  2/2/2016

  In The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind give a descriptive, predictive and normative argument for the impending dissolution of our professional institutions in their current state. Although she questions the decision to leave issues of privacy, confidentiality and online security unexamined, Jennifer Miller positions this book as an accessible and theoretically grounded account of why professional work can, will and must change.

  If you are interested in this review, you may also like to listen to a podcast of Richard and Daniel Susskind’s lecture at LSE, held on 30 November 2015.

  The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts. Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind. Oxford University Press. 2015.

  Future of ProfessionsWe’ve grown accustomed to the decaying hulls of factories and abandoned shopping centres. We’ve begun to see the hollowing out of suburban office parks and we can even envision being transported by fleets of robot taxis. Yet we are working, studying and legislating as though our schools, courts and hospitals will continue as hubs of economic activity abuzz with an app-enabled but largely unchanged cadre of educators, lawyers and doctors. Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind provide a descriptive, predictive and normative account of why our professional institutions will not, and should not, endure. The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts deserves to be widely read because society, and professionals in particular, are operating with limited vision and flawed assumptions about the future of professional work.

  Richard Susskind’s extensive career advising business and government at the highest levels, including as IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, has focused on the future of the legal profession (see The Future of Law: Facing the Challenges of Information Technology, The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services and Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future). His own background is in law, a field in which he holds professorships at University College London and at the University of Strathclyde.

  His legal background and previous works inform the coverage of law in Chapter Two, which examines the cutting-edge of current practice and predicts future directions. For the legal profession, the authors describe recent innovations in practice like online dispute resolution, virtual courts and the automated preparation of legal documents. They predict that deregulation, disaggregation of legal tasks and the embedding of legal compliance within systems and structures will further transform today’s costly and inscrutable legal system.

  They describe disruptive innovation in education and health, two professions that have attracted a great deal of speculation already (see, for instance, Eric Topol, The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in your Hands; Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere; and Will Richardson, Why School?: How Education Must Change When Learning and Information are Everywhere). More surprisingly, they describe radical technical change in the work of the clergy, tax advisers, management consultants and architects. In each case they find that technology will make expertise much more accessible to consumers and leave a small role for human experts. Of the major professions, only engineering was not included.
  11123530043_1d28f2fa35_oImage Credit: tec_estromberg

  Not everyone is convinced. In Chapter Six the authors counter several anxieties and objections to their future vision of the professions, applying the logic of cost-benefit analysis. They emphasise how lowering the cost of expert advice will extend its benefits throughout society. They then use the benefits of increased access to refute a series of counterarguments in turn – what about the loss of craft? The preference for human interaction? The need for empathy? It is an effectively constructed argument, as the benefits of wider access probably do outweigh any single one of these costs. Yet the real question is whether the benefits outweigh the loss of the professions to creative destruction.

  This book explicitly does not address ‘privacy, confidentiality, security, and liability’ or ‘the dark side of the Internet’. While it may have been impossible to address these topics thoroughly within the scope of this already ambitious book, I think the authors went too far in setting them completely aside. With a new data breach in the news every week and the increasing engagement of state actors, it is clear that our IT infrastructure operates in a hostile environment. For example, if a nation’s medical diagnostic expertise is concentrated in an expert system rather than dispersed among human experts, it is vulnerable to system outages and covert manipulation.

  The risks aren’t limited to cybersecurity. The authors envision a model where most professional advice is available free to users. Yet free information is not a bar to profiteering. As the saying goes, ‘if you are not paying for the product, you are the product’. When the authors suggest that the problem of empathy in delivering bad news could be countered through an algorithm using consumers’ ‘psychological and emotional profiles’, they seem untroubled by the prospect of such profiles taking their place alongside credit reports and criminal background checks in the business environment. Given Richard Susskind’s legal background, it’s surprising that liability, and accountability more generally, are set aside.

  One area where the professions have arguably been successful is as a pathway to good work: work that is stable, well-compensated, intellectually engaging and often motivated by values beyond the market. The authors unambiguously predict ‘a decline in demand for the traditional professions and the conventional professional worker’. However, they do foresee a variety of new and emerging roles with the potential to provide good work: para-professionals, craftspeople, process analysts, system engineers and even specialist ‘empathizers’. These proposed future roles are another place where neglecting security issues leaves the book incomplete. There might well be future roles for white-hat hackers, personal data guardians, privacy officers and other security workers.

  In a book that is accessible to a broad audience yet theoretically grounded, the authors approach professions as the result of a grand bargain to address specific properties of specialist knowledge. They find this grand bargain with the professions now failing ‘economically, technologically, psychologically, morally, qualitatively, and in terms of their inscrutability’. Technology offers alternatives that will displace much of the current professional workforce. Susskind and Susskind argue that we can, will and in fact do face a moral obligation to transform our institutions for access to expert knowledge.

  Jennifer Miller is an Assistant Professor (Teaching) at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy. She received her doctorate in public policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests focus on the intersection between science and technology policy and the future of work. She has also written about collaboration among universities, industry and government in university research centres. Before pursuing her doctorate, she worked for IBM in human resources. Read more reviews by Jennifer Miller.

• Law21
  https://www.law21.ca/2009/02/book-review-the-end-of-lawyers/
  Word count: 2058

  Quoted in Sidelights: We talk a lot about “visionaries” these days, but in the legal profession, nobody seriously competes with Richard Susskind for that title,
  The details and depth … should be enough to persuade most readers that these trends are real and they are irreversible.
  provides a unique panoramic view of a legal marketplace in unprecedented flux
  enormously important

  Book Review: The End of Lawyers?

  February 10, 2009 by Jordan Furlong with 18 Comments

  Posted in: Books, Innovation

  The End of Lawyers? by Richard Susskind (London: Oxford University Press, 2008)

  This is an enormously important book, and if you have any interest or stake in how the legal marketplace will operate in future, you have to read it. The End of Lawyers? provides a sweeping assessment (and in places, an indictment) of today’s legal services landscape and describes the architecture of the systems that will replace it. It identifies the pressure points where the legal services marketplace is poised to fracture and describes the forces that will cause the breaks. But what really stands out about The End of Lawyers? is its comprehensive depiction of a profession undergoing massive transformation – it provides a unique panoramic view of a legal marketplace in unprecedented flux. We talk a lot about “visionaries” these days, but in the legal profession, nobody seriously competes with Richard Susskind for that title, and this book shows why.

  Now, I’m a little late to this party — many other people have written excellent reviews already, most recently this incisive commentary by Mitch Kowalski at the Legal Post. Others have also covered this terrain very well, including Bruce MacEwen, Jim Hasset, Nick Holmes and Ted Tjaden, as well as numerous consumer reviews at the Amazons of the world. Accordingly, while I’ll provide an overview of the book’s contents, strengths and weaknesses, I’m going to try focusing more on what the book represents in the history of legal innovation (answer: a watershed) and its implications for the legal profession’s evolution (answer: potentially shattering).

  The End of Lawyers? relates how technology (especially the Internet), collaboration, globalization, and other forces are changing the fundamental rules by which legal services are bought and sold. The book is characterized by several key observations about how the legal marketplace is being transformed, with three especially significant ones:

  The identification of an evolving and fluid spectrum of legal services categories: bespoke (one-off, customized or tailored), standardized (drawing upon precedents, process or previous work), systematized (reduced and applied to automated systems), packaged (systematized services exported to clients) and commoditized (packaged services so commonplace as to have little or no market value). Most lawyers insist that their services cluster around the left-hand end of this spectrum; Richard convincingly argues that movement to the right is inevitable for many types of legal services, with profound implications for lawyers’ business models.

  The decomposition of legal tasks into component parts that can be delegated to various sources, few of them actual law firm lawyers. Twelve types of destinations for this multi-sourcing (reminiscent of unbundling) are identified: in-sourcing, de-lawyering, relocating, offshoring, outsourcing, subcontracting, co-sourcing, leasing, home-sourcing, open-sourcing, computerizing and no-sourcing, each of which is explained in more illuminating detail. Despite this multiplicity of legal work performers, an overarching entity responsible for managing the work must exist, and all the systems and processes involved must work together seamlessly.

  In the context of astonishingly deep and rapid technological advances, the emergence of no fewer than ten disruptive (in the Clayton Christensen sense) legal technologies: automated document assembly, relentless connectivity, the electronic legal marketplace, e-learning, online legal guidance, legal open-sourcing, closed legal communities, workflow and project management, embedded legal knowledge, and online dispute resolution. These developments offer tremendous opportunity for more efficient and effective legal services delivery; but they also represent major threats to various aspects of the traditional law firm business model.

  And this really is just a sampling – only an actual précis of the contents could convey everything that the book suggests. The details and depth in which these and other observations are explained and illustrated, with ample use of current examples, should be enough to persuade most readers that these trends are real and they are irreversible. But over the course of the book, Richard makes other observations that can fairly be called eye-popping ­– they open the mind to possibilities that none of us have been pondering:

  the existential threat to in-house lawyers, who will be as susceptible as their outside counsel to being swept aside altogether if they fail to create or facilitate value;

  the possibility that mediators, arbitrators, judges and even courts could be partly or wholly disintermediated by online dispute resolution (think: Facebook juries);

  new lawyers learning their trade by practising on artificial clients – participating in simulated learning environments not unlike Second Life.

  As David Maister notes in a dust-jacket testimonial, you don’t have to agree with all of this book’s assessments and conclusions to appreciate the importance of absorbing these ideas and their implications. I personally think there are far more hits than misses among the book’s prognostications, but what’s really important about The End of Lawyers? is that we now have a comprehensive and fully imagined picture of the new legal service marketplace towards which we are now hurtling – and on top of that, we have an example of the power of imagination in legal services innovation.

  The myriad trends identified in this book all have one thing in common: they strip lawyers of the control and influence they’re accustomed to exercising over the legal services marketplace. The clearest message Richard sends in The End of Lawyers? is that from this point onwards, and to a increasing degree as time goes on, clients will call the shots. They will learn from the previous experiences of similarly situated clients, obtain services from reliable sources outside the legal profession, and benefit from technological advances that knock down price and access barriers. The means by which and the price at which legal services are delivered will be shaped by the marketplace, not by lawyers.

  Regardless of which of the book’s forecasts are accurate (and even half of them would render the legal services market virtually unrecognizable), that’s a heart-stopping conclusion. And that’s why most lawyers who hear Richard’s prognostications react either with anger or denial. We all know by now that these are the first two stages in the process of accepting loss.

  These lawyers might be tempted to dismiss the conjectures and conclusions of this book as mere predictions about the future. What they need to appreciate is that this book’s claims aren’t really “predictions,” in the popular use of the term. Richard is not predicting here, but “presuming,” in the legal sense. My criminal law professor used to explain “presumption” with the story of Dr. Stanley, who, making his way through African jungle in the 19th century in search of a missing British explorer, suddenly came across a Caucasian Briton near Lake Tanganyika. Recognizing that the facts before him led to one very likely conclusion, he said: “Dr. Livingston, I presume?”

  In the same way, Richard is presuming the eventual state of the legal marketplace from real evidence and undeniable trends. He’s not making this stuff up, and he’s not just throwing darts at a board. He gathers all the facts on the ground and trends in the air (the unprecedented pressures on the traditional legal marketplace), ties these disparate strands together, and figures out where they logically must lead. As a result, his conclusions aren’t nearly as radical as they might seem — they’re the natural outcomes of forces and developments that he clearly has demonstrated is already taking shape.

  This is already a long review, and I could go on at greater length about everything raised in this book. But I want to point out an element of The End of Lawyers? that can go overlooked by those of us primarily concerned with the fate of lawyers. Chapter 7, “Access to Justice and the Law,” is enormously important and valuable for its insights into a far more pressing issue: the unmet legal needs of literally millions of people, and the social cost this unmet need extracts.

  Richard comes to the law from an IT background, and throughout this book, you can detect the technologist’s overriding desire for greater systems efficiency. You get the sense that the legal services marketplace offends him not least for its staggering misallocation of resources and wasted opportunities for better processes and results. But when the conversation turns to access to justice, another voice emerges, that of the author’s deep commitment to the ways in which society at large should and could be far better served in the legal services field.

  It’s not just that so many people can’t afford their day in court — it’s also that so many people don’t even know that their unhappy situations merit a day in court, that they have rights and channels through which they can exercise those rights. The law delivers too many ambulances at the bottom of cliffs and not enough railings at the top. Unrecognized and unmet (or met too late) legal needs are a blight on society, and Richard lays out the ways in which this can be addressed (noting along the way, for self-interested lawyers, that the flip side of “unmet legal needs” is “the latent legal market”). It’s only one chapter, but if its implications and promises are taken up, it could well prove to be the most important one.

  As always, I feel it’s important to identify the less positive aspects even of books I like. I would argue that the 12 multi-sourcing targets are too finely separated, and that the list could fairly have been just 8 or 9. The section on clients contains an evolving series of law firm and client grids that become confusing and distracting as they go on. The language and many of the examples (especially on the access-to-justice side) show this to be a book written primarily with a UK audience in mind – an alternative or future edition conversant with cultures and developments on both sides of the Atlantic would be helpful. This is yet another book about law practice that could use a more comprehensive index. And I would have liked to read more on law firms’ business models and the fatal problems with legal education, although admittedly these are outside the book’s purview. As you can gather, I don’t think these shortcomings damage its power and significance.

  Finally, much has been made of the title, and no doubt some people believe (inaccurately) that the author is gleefully prophesying the extinction of homo legalis. Richard reiterates in the conclusion the significance of the question mark, “intended to confirm that this book is an inquiry into whether lawyers have a future rather than a prediction of their demise.” But I think there’s another sense in which the title could be interpreted without the need for the interrogatory.

  If we take another meaning of “end” ­– an outcome worked toward or an objective for which effort is expended, rather than the more popular meaning of “disappearance” — then we could say that this is a book about where lawyers are going, and what use will be made of them when they get there. In that sense, the book warns, if the profession stubbornly ignores or resists these clear changes to the surrounding environment, then the end of lawyers could be, indeed, the end of lawyers.

  But it doesn’t have to be that way, and it’s not what Richard Susskind is rooting for. He sees a radically transformed legal profession at the end of this process, and clearly hopes that this new profession can and will provide smarter, earlier and more effective legal guidance to a much broader range of clients. That’s an end of lawyers we should all be pulling for.

• Law Society Gazette
  https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/reviews/book-review-tomorrows-lawyers/68977.article
  Word count: 921

  Quoted in Sidelights: Susskind’s in-depth understanding of his subject and ability to explain his views with real clarity has resulted in a thoughtful book which, in only 165 pages, covers many key issues of concern to law firms today.
  Reviews
  BOOK REVIEW Tomorrow’s Lawyers

  By Richard Susskind14 January 2013

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  Reviewed by: Joanna Goodman
  Author: Richard Susskind
  Publisher: Oxford University Press
  ISBN: 978-0-19-966806-9
  Price: £9.99

  Liberalisation is revolutionising the legal services landscape and one of the side effects is a rash of predictions from a multitude of sector commentators. But Professor Richard Susskind is different, one might argue – his predictions come true.

  Tomorrow’s Lawyers, Susskind’s latest book, has a more optimistic title than The End of Lawyers? (2008), which he has referred to as ‘The End of Lawyers – question mark’. Tomorrow’s Lawyers removes the question mark and sets out a vision for the profession’s future. Unlike The End of Lawyers?, which has a textbook feel, Tomorrow’s Lawyers is a slim volume in a more conversational style. It took less than a day to read.

  Susskind has seen his earlier forecasts around the ‘decomposition’ of legal services become reality. Tomorrow’s Lawyers is built on a long series of accurate predictions, and it is upbeat – he believes the profession is being invigorated by change. In order to make Tomorrow’s Lawyers a standalone read, as opposed to the latest in a ‘series’, the first section encapsulates and updates the key themes of The End of Lawyers?: the ‘more for less’ challenge around client expectations; market liberalisation and technology.

  Susskind outlines how firms are using technology to realise two key strategies for success – efficiency and collaboration. He analyses the evolution of legal service delivery, notably the ‘decomposition’ of work into different functions that are delivered in different ways, including outsourcing and automation. We are treated to a list of other familiar ‘disruptive’ technologies and issues around dealing with resistance to change.

  For those familiar with Susskind’s writing, the second and third sections are more interesting. Part two deals with how lawyers can work differently in the new liberalised landscape. Resistance to change is neatly linked to the succession issues that many firms face. Susskind observes that, these days, junior partners are less confident about the future.

  I found the chapter on in-house lawyers particularly engaging as it looks at the relationship between in-house and external counsel from the perspective of one who consults with both. Susskind predicts greater collaboration between in-house legal departments – as is already happening in the public sector – boosting efficiency. Unsurprisingly, he expects post-liberalisation market entrants and online legal services to increase competition. Susskind also considers the skills tomorrow’s lawyers will need. They will need to be more in tune with tomorrow’s clients, of course, he says; but lawyers have always differentiated themselves from other legal services providers by their trusted adviser status.

  He highlights new ways of developing lawyer-client connections and synergies, using social media and online platforms. Susskind envisages legal work becoming more IT-driven, with a light hand on the tiller, and applies the same principle to the work of judges and courts, explaining how IT supports access to justice and facilitates dispute resolution. He offers insights into the workings of the judiciary, and the development of courtroom technology and online dispute resolution. Having set out the ‘IT enabled… world into which tomorrow’s lawyers are striding’, part three relates Susskind’s conviction that there will be fewer traditional roles and employers for lawyers, and a host of new ones.

  He insists it will still make sense to qualify as a conventional lawyer and, if possible, train in a law firm, though some would question whether this is the best route into many of the new roles he highlights. Does a good legal technologist, for example, need to be a qualified lawyer? Some legal technologists are former lawyers, while others bring added value from different industries. Another Susskind prediction to watch is the re-entry of the global accounting firms into the legal sector.

  Susskind’s message to tomorrow’s lawyers is to be flexible – your first job may or may not be in a law firm, or as what we now consider to be a ‘conventional’ lawyer. This leads him to question the direction of legal education and training, which clearly needs to change. Susskind outlines some of the options on offer and devotes an entire chapter to questions that young, aspiring lawyers could consider asking potential employers. He urges them to look at how they can invent their own future and that of the industry.

  Tomorrow’s Lawyers is a worthwhile read for anyone involved in legal services and education, particularly if you have not read Susskind’s previous books. If you have, although there is some repetition – albeit updated – Susskind’s in-depth understanding of his subject and ability to explain his views with real clarity has resulted in a thoughtful book which, in only 165 pages, covers many key issues of concern to law firms today. When it comes to keeping up with technology, Susskind is again true to his word. Tomorrow’s Lawyers will be available for Kindle at the end of January.

  Joanna Goodman is a former editor of Legal Technology Journal and a Gazette columnist

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