Looking for innovation in the delivery of legal solutions leads naturally to an examination of small business of lawyering, as opposed to the practice of law, and there is a huge variety of prospective new business models to be viewed as.
Several of these are touched on in Richard Susskind’s operate, such as his 2009 The Finish of Lawyers. 1 of Susskind’s basic points is that considerably of what lawyers do is repetitive and not especially intelligent or creative. In a enterprise context, we normally refer to anything that is higher volume, low ability, repetitive work as a commodity, and in the enterprise world it is a properly identified pattern that most solutions have a life-cycle that ends in commoditization.
Surely this could not come about to a single of the world’s oldest professions? Susskind tends to make a very good case that it can and will happen to massive chunks of what is at the moment considered to be the practice of law-in any case where lawyers’ perform can reliably be decreased to a method.
In the UK for instance it is possible to incorporate a new company online in much less than an hour for about 120.85 and some weeks later you acquire your corporate record books in the post, full with the minutes of your 1st shareholders and directors meetings Legalzoom.com in the United States is offering equivalent solutions there. The identical type of on line company can possibly be done with any legal company that is principally form-filling. Consider the implications of this for immigration law, for example.
A extra sophisticated version of this model currently exists in the a substantial number of what are referred to as legal “factories”, which at their greatest are sites where members of the public enter their personal information which is analyzed by straightforward application that determines no matter if they have the kind of case that is profitable to the legal services provider. If they do then the data is then passed on to a team of paralegals for additional processing, whilst the paralegals are supervised by a small quantity of lawyers at the major of the pyramid. Personal injury, divorce (quickie-divorce.com!), and unfair dismissal claims are all getting processed this way in the UK, and in the US Legalzoom.com covers wills, divorce, and even patent filings with a related model.
The apparent criticism of this sort of model is that it higher-grades the simplest and easiest instances so that the “law firm” can make the most funds for the least work. This is anathema to those lawyers who pride themselves on undertaking great and inventive operate for clientele who most will need their help. On the other hand, the much better view is that simply because these commoditized business models can give uncomplicated services so cheaply, they deliver access to legal solutions to that large majority of the public who could by no means otherwise afford to employ a lawyer.
Off-shoring legal function to India or other low-price economies (legal course of action outsourcing, or “LPO”) is another class of enterprise models. The LPO industry in India is only six years old, but it is currently worth 124.38+ million in annual sales. There are some really huge law firm and corporate customers (Microsoft, and Rio Tinto for instance) who are finding good results, and in IP it is becoming a relatively well known path-prior art searches and patent invalidity analyses are on a regular basis completed in India. The economic forces pulling towards LPO are overwhelming, and LPO alone has the potential to both revolutionize and globalize the delivery of legal solutions about the planet.
Additionally, محامي جدة established in the UK towards enabling non-lawyer ownership of law firms has implications for extra dramatic adjust, such as IPOs of international firms or the entry of hedge funds these scenarios raise almost as numerous concerns about ethics as they do possibilities for innovation.