Four Factors that Could Change Law Practice
The large law firm model is feeling stress—partly from its own practice of hiring more lawyers while promoting fewer into equity partnerships. As more associates decline to devote their careers to increasingly risky chances of partnership, will law practice have to change?
Maybe. The American Lawyer lists four factors that could change law practice, but notes its past predictions have not always panned out. The changing law firm model that spurs less loyalty among associates is one of the factors cited by the magazine. The others are:
• Nonlawyer investment. Nonlawyers will soon be allowed to invest in law firms in England. Elsewhere, nonlawyers may fund experiments that threaten established ways of law practice and law firm regulations.
• Corporate clients are increasingly dissatisfied with high hourly billing rates and big associate salaries. The concerns prompted the Association of Corporate Counsel to launch its “Value Challenge,” an initiative to spur alternative billing by companies’ outside law firms.
• Technology will allow routine matters to be handled more quickly and at a lower cost.
Many of the factors suggest a possible change in the way legal work is performed, according to the American Lawyer. “It’s not that the work would go away, just that it would be handled differently,” the article says. “New organizations would develop that could handle the routine searching, filing, and drafting; the change scenarios imagine technology swooping in to provide these methods. …
“With much of the fat pared away, real specialists, the law firms and lawyers with reputations as high-cost providers worth the higher cost, could be even more successful than they are today.”
