Susskind looks ahead

The second installment of the College of Law (UK) podcast series is an interview with Richard Susskind, author of The End of Lawyers? and all-around legal industry futurist guru.  Susskind talks about disintermediation, external investment, commoditization, the Rio Tinto experiment, the Axiom model, and more.  (Via Charon QC.)

Some excerpts:

[There will be much less of] the traditional one-to-one consultative advisory bespoke service delivered on an hourly billing basis.  So if you read John Grisham or watch ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’ … the models of legal service we see there will think not disappear, but will diminish.

Routine and repetitive work is being done by junior lawyers at very high hourly rate: this has got to stop.

The efficiency strategy calls for people to rethink their real estate strategy: do we need the buildings? 

Well, there’s two kinds of change in life, isn’t there, there’s evolution and revolution, and it’s quite hard as a government to be anything other than evolutionary.  In my heart I feel the whole legal services sector needs some revolution, and this is what external investment brings, it brings people who aren’t burdened by the past, there’s no legacy, it’s a blank sheet of paper with a big market. 

There’s millions of people employed in this sector around the world, it fundamentally affects everyone’s existence, and yet no-one’s thinking much more than 18 months ahead.

Listen to whole thing here.

Bonus:  The College of Law’s web site features a Jargon Buster

                                                 -posted by brian