The Legal Services Act – The Verdict of the Experts
The full ramifications of the Legal Services Act (LSA) are only now beginning to be explored in the media. Despite warnings in the wake of the Clementi review that the changes represented ‘a wakeup call for lawyers’, many have been slow to visualise the new legal landscape. It is becoming clear that in the ‘Brave New World’ for legal services heralded in a recent Intendence report, the market will face serious upheaval, powerful competitive forces will be unleashed and traditional business models will be swept away in what some experts are calling ‘the big bang for the legal profession’. This article will look at the predictions of two experts, Richard Susskind, the Times Law Columnist and Professor Stephen Mayson the Professor of Strategy and Director of the Legal Services Policy Institute at The College of Law.
Richard Susskind
“The end of lawyers?”
Richard Susskind’s new book, ‘The End of Lawyers?’ (subtitled, Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services), points to a future in which conventional legal advisers will be less prominent in society than today. Susskind argues that the legal profession needs to undergo a significant transformation to avoid extinction. According to the book the legal profession will need to react to two market forces: firstly, an irresistible pull towards commoditisation and secondly, ongoing development and uptake of information technology which will become increasingly important for cutting costs and delivering legal services to the web generation of consumers. The tone of the book isn’t entirely apocalyptic as Susskind concludes that new and different roles in the new world will emerge for adaptable lawyers.As Susskind argues:
“the challenge I lay down here is for all lawyers to introspect, and to ask themselves, with their hands on their hearts, what elements of their current workload could be undertaken differently — more quickly, cheaply, efficiently, or to a higher quality — using alternative methods of working. In other words, the challenge for legal readers is to identify their distinctive skills and talents, the capabilities that they possess that cannot, crudely, be replaced by advanced systems or by less costly workers supported by technology or standard processes, or by lay people armed with online self-help tools……. The market will determine that the legal world is over-resourced, it will increasingly drive out inefficiencies and unnecessary friction and, in so doing, we will indeed witness the end of outdated legal practice and the end of outdated lawyers.”
Stephen Mayson
“Catalyst, Cataclysm or Catastrophe”
Stephen Mayson is head of the Legal Policy Institute think-tank set up to examine the implications of the LSA. In a recent article in the Law Society Gazette he stated that changes to the market which will begin to take place when the act comes fully into force in 2012 will mean that qualified lawyers will only be used for reserved activities, such as probate and litigation.
Stephen Mayson has argued in several prominent speeches that the legal services reforms are intended to bring about upheaval and reform in the legal services market and that the forces unleashed could be catalytic. Law firms will need to restructure and possibly refinance to consolidate, to recruit, train and promote sensibly, and to engage in even more sophisticated strategy and management. Mayson predicts that many law firms will be forced to consolidate or go out of business.
During a speech at the Law London 2008 event, Mayson said law firms would be competing with big, established brands such as supermarkets and membership organisations, which would not use qualified lawyers for unreserved work. This would leave firms with a difficult choice: to get rid of qualified staff, or pay them less.
Mayson added: ‘We probably have twice as many qualified lawyers as that market needs. The number of lawyers has doubled, but the volume of work in reserved activities has not… We have got to get much tighter on what we pay for. The AA and HBOS are doing [legal] work on a massive scale. There aren’t that many law firms around that can compete. Are we going to roll over, or think about consolidation?… The one thing that makes an industry vulnerable is the incumbents not changing. Thinking like lawyers could spell the end.’