Law Practice Management
Futurist Says Lawyers Will Become Legal Risk Consultants
Posted Nov 14, 2008 8:37 AM CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
A legal futurist predicts that lawyers advising corporations will change their practice models to offer a wide range of advice on how to avoid legal problems.
In the second installment of a two-part interview with the Am Law Daily, futurist Richard Susskind said in-house lawyers who talk to him emphasize the need to avoid future legal problems. “And yet, hardly a lawyer or law firm on the planet has chosen to develop methods, tools, techniques or systems to help their clients review, identify, quantify and control the legal risks that they face,” he said. “I expect this to change.”
He believes lawyers will begin offering “a wide range of proactive legal services whose focus will be on anticipating and pre-empting legal problems. In some ways more like a form of strategy consulting, this legal work will be wider ranging and more generic, helping clients prepare more responsibly for the future.”
“This could fundamentally change the way in which the law is practiced,” he told the Am Law Daily.
In the first installment of the Am Law Daily interview, Susskind predicted that legal services will be “commoditized” and delivered more cheaply. He said more legal work will be outsourced, and more clients will collaborate to share the costs of some legal services, such as regulatory compliance.
“The party is now over,” said Susskind, the author of The End of Lawyers? “The credit crunch is going to accelerate change in the legal profession.”
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Comments
B. McLeod
Nov 14, 2008 8:45 AM CST
Thought we already do that NOW. He should BILL himself as a “NOW-IST”
R. Curtis McNeil
Nov 14, 2008 11:26 AM CST
I thought the whole point of being in-house counsel was to assess and make recommendations relevant to consequence management when engaged in the conduct of high risk activities.
Thomas Cochrane
Nov 14, 2008 11:35 AM CST
“NOW-ist” LOL
I work in-house for a large AFSCME local union, and I’d say most of what we do amounts to managing risk. We balance the wants and needs of the membership—as expressed through its elected leadership—against the potential legal risks that they entail.
If I couldn’t anticipate and pre-empt legally risky union practices, I wouldn’t be serving my client, I’d just be taking up space.
cjt
Nov 14, 2008 11:41 AM CST
The end of lawyers? Because we have to manage risk? Um… pretty sure that’s what many of us do on a regular basis. On a side note, I project the end of legal futurists because all they do is state the obvious and bring nothing to the table in the way of practical knowledge.
Thomas Gaa
Nov 14, 2008 11:52 AM CST
I work with in-house counsel daily and the focus of our collaboration is on identifying and dealing with current risks and identifying and reducing long-term risks. Dealing with risk is not the future, its what lawyers have done since laws were first articulated.
David Brennan
Nov 14, 2008 3:57 PM CST
The risk management requirements are nothing new for lawyers. As others noted, In house and outside corporate counsel have engaged in this practice for decades. As regulatory framworks change in a variety of settings, the obligations to provide those risk services increases. It does not sound any bell for the end of practice as we know it, but a situation where there will be greater responsibilities to determine the legal or other risks involved in a give paradigm and to provide a broader range of competent advice. In an academic setting, it means we have to expand each student’s capacity to identify and evaluate risks, and to be able to provide the technically correct or best possible advice to a client. Critics of Susskind might call this practice vin ordinarie “Lawyering 101A.”
Cecil B. Baffles
Nov 14, 2008 4:16 PM CST
“hardly a lawyer or law firm on the planet has chosen to develop methods, tools, techniques or systems to help their clients review, identify, quantify and control the legal risks that they face”
what
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