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One of the problems with being an author who makes predictions is that, eventually, you can be called to account. With the benefit of hindsight, critics can expose the misconceptions and the naiveties. Or, much less likely, they can confirm that the vision has been fully realised.

In my book, The Future of Law, published in 1996, I made many predictions. When judging that book, however, commentators often overlook the fact that the view of the legal world set out there was a 20-year view. I was speculating about changes from 1996 to 2016 (give or take). Today, we are just past the half-way point of the 20-year transition and so it is still a little early to assert that I was right or wrong. That said, I think it worth saying that I remain committed to that book’s central themes and that we are on course for many of the fundamental changes I anticipated.

Perhaps the most crucial line of thought was that we were witnessing what I called a change in the "information substructure" in society. I used this term to refer to the dominant means by which information is captured, shared and disseminated within society. I observed, as some anthropologists have, that you can see that human beings have travelled through four phases in relation to information substructure: the first being the era of orality, where communication was dominated by speech; thereafter the era of script; then came print; and then, and we were in that transition then (and still are), into the fourth stage — of the world of information technology.

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My next point, and I still strongly believe this, is that the information substructure in society — this dominant means by which information is captured, shared and communicated — dictates to a large extent the quantity of our law, the complexity of our law, the regularity with which our law can change, and those who are able to advise upon it and be knowledgeable about it.

If we look at the way the law has changed throughout history, we can see transitions as the information substructure has changed. I argued that there was going to be a shift in legal paradigm (although now the notion of "paradigm" is rather overused). By this I meant that many of our fundamental assumptions about the nature of legal service and the nature of legal process would be challenged by the coming of information technology and the internet. In other words, much that we had always taken for granted in the past, about the way that lawyers work and the way non-lawyers receive legal guidance, would change through technology.

I also identified a phenomenon that I introduced as the "technology lag". This was a lag between two forms of technology: data processing and knowledge processing. Data processing is our use of technology to capture, distribute, reproduce and disseminate information. We have become extremely adept at this. Indeed, everyone who bemoans the information overload that affects all of us will say we have become too good at data processing. But now, knowledge processing is coming to the rescue.

This is a set of technologies that helps us analyse, sift through and sort out the mountains of data that we have created and helps make them more manageable. Data processing has advanced well ahead of knowledge processing, but the gap between the two — the technology lag — is going to close. When it closes, we will be fully in the information society.

I believe now, and I believed then, that we are in a transitional phase between the print-based industrial society and the IT-based information society. Only when knowledge-based technologies allow us to manage more effectively these mountains of data we have created, will we be fully in the information society.

I talked also of the "latent legal market", and this attracted a lot of interest. This was the notion that many people in their social and in their working lives need legal help and would benefit from legal guidance but lack the resources, or perhaps simply the courage, to secure legal counsel from lawyers. I believe things have changed: on the internet we now have vast resources available to people who, from the Government’s 2,500 websites or the innumerable voluntary legal services sector websites, can obtain practical, punchy legal guidance. I believe there is not just a latent legal market for the ordinary citizen but also for major organisations, too, when they find it difficult to secure legal guidance on all those occasions when they need it.

All of this led me to speak about access to justice - not in the sense that Lord Woolf, the former Lord Chief Justice, was then speaking of access to justice, when he referred to improved access and greater access to dispute resolution — but in a broader sense. I had in mind the notion that as citizens we should be able to find out easily and quickly what our legal entitlements are, and in so doing, we should be able to avoid legal disputes.

I pointed at the same time to a phenomenon I refer to as "hyper-regulation". By that I meant we are all governed today by a body of rules and laws that are so complex and so large in extent that no one can pretend to have mastery of them all. I argued then that hyper-regulation means not that there is too much law by some objective standard, but that there is too much law given our current methods of managing it. Of course, I was creeping towards the suggestion that, with the coming of knowledge-based technologies, the volume of the law would be more easily managed with the assistance of our systems.

I also drew attention to innumerable emerging technologies that seemed likely, at the time, to be tremendously important. It is laughable in retrospect, but e-mail was one of them. When I suggested ten years ago that e-mail would become the principal means by which clients and lawyers would communicate, many people suggested I was dangerous, that I was probably insane and that I certainly did not understand anything about security or confidentiality. But that technology and many other emerging technologies have now firmly taken hold.

While much has happened since 1996, much more is yet to unfold. I believe that within the next ten years — it might be a little more, it might be a little less — we will see this technology lag, this gap between knowledge and data processing, closing. We will emerge into an era in which we will have at our finger-tps, through the internet and other facilities, all manner of legal guidance and legal resources that were barely imaginable ten years ago.

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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