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After years of talking with a wide variety of lawyers, I have found that many practitioners have one thing in common: they seem to want to deny that they are, well, lawyers. They downplay the legal content of their jobs.

Private client lawyers (for example, those who advise on divorces or draft wills) tell me that their job is not really about the law; rather, they insist, they are experienced counsellors, confidantes, therapists even, in whom their clients have unwavering faith in relation to their personal problems.

In similar vein, litigators say that their primary role in life is that of project manager rather than provider of legal advice; corporate lawyers claim to be deal-makers and negotiators much less than legal draftsmen; capital market lawyers suggest they are transaction managers rather than gurus of finance law; in-house lawyers maintain they are risk managers more than legal counsellors; banking lawyers assert their clients come to them not for legal advice but for their market knowledge; and high street solicitors insist that they rarely undertake legal research. Even judges say that they are becoming . . . case managers.

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Where have all the lawyers gone? Why are lawyers not undertaking the rarefied legal work that our law schools led us to expect (and many still do)?

A variety of reasons might be advanced for lawyers denying they are lawyers. One response might be that being a lawyer is, bluntly, not the coolest of jobs, and perhaps not as prestigious as once it was. There may even be a stigma of sorts attached to being a lawyer — hence the wealth of lawyer jokes. And so, in response, lawyers might be holding themselves out as belonging, at least in part, to another discipline.

I do not accept this line of thought. It may be that the ill-informed and the disconnected will trash the legal profession but in most walks of life lawyers remain well respected. In any event, I cannot imagine according to what scale it is cooler or more prestigious to be, say, a project manager than a lawyer, with all due respect to project managers.

It may be that lawyers often genuinely forget how much they know about the law and so do not regard themselves as especially lawyerly. Or perhaps they do not feel that it is their legal knowledge that differentiates them in the marketplace and so they point to complementary skills of which they are proud.

There is something different here, I believe, from yesteryear’s traditional role of the lawyer as the “man of affairs”, the all-purpose rock of an adviser upon whom clients could unfailingly rely. That old boy (and these chaps were invariably male) regarded the law, in contemporary jargon, as their core competence, around which they built more general business acumen.

In contrast, the modern lawyer, who is in denial of being lawyerly, seems to want argue that they have some different core competence and relegate their legal ability to the background or periphery. I believe this is an indicator of profound forces at play, forces that are lessening the need for the traditional "black letter" lawyer. When it becomes possible to standardise, systematise, package and even commoditise the law, the need for the traditional bespoke handling by the conventional lawyer lessens considerably.

Lawyers’ denial of their lawyerliness is an early but crucial indicator that they can sense there is less purely legal work to be done and so they are beginning to adapt. Whether they are fully conscious of this phenomenon or not, in order to survive, many are widening their range of skills, broadening their sphere of impact, and are anxious that the world does not pigeon hole them as detached analysts who sit in ivory towers. Most lawyers, in other words, can no longer eke a living from the law alone.

Lawyers, like the rest of humanity, face the threat of "disintermediation" (broadly, being cut out of some supply chain) by smart systems; and, as in other sectors, if they want to survive, their focus should be on re-intermediating — that is, on finding news ways of invaluably inserting themselves in supply chains. This will lead, I believe, to the emergence of what I call “legal hybrids”: individuals of multi-disciplinary background, whose training in law will have evolved and dovetail with a formal education in one or more other disciplines.

The formality is important. When most lawyers claim today that they are, say, project managers or counsellors, they are nothing of the sort. Too often they but dabble. They are dilettantes who have read an article or two and attended a few seminars or intense courses. We would not dare call someone a lawyer on the strength of similar schooling.

If lawyers want to re-invent themselves and carve out new multi-disciplinary roles that allow them to deliver new value, then their commitment to these neighbouring areas of expertise must be deep and our law schools should be gearing up accordingly. In this way, we will also formally be equipping lawyers of the future with the tools and knowledge to solve business problems and not just legal problems.

I am not suggesting that there will be no call for the traditional legal expert. I am saying there will be less call for these individuals, because new ways of satisfying legal demand will evolve and old inefficiencies will be eliminated.

On top of this smaller group of genuine legal specialists and this growing cadre of hybrids, I also envisage the emergence of a third grouping: the legal knowledge engineers. These are the highly skilled individuals who will be engaged in the jobs of standardising, systematising and packaging the law. They will be the analysts who reorganise and restructure legal knowledge in a form that can be embodied in smart systems, whether for use by lawyers, para-legals or lay people.

Richard Susskind is Emeritus Professor of Law at Gresham College, IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice and consultant to leading law firms. He was awarded an OBE in 2000. This is an extract from his forthcoming book, The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services. For more information click here

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