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Over the last two years or so, I have been informally asked to advise the friends of my teenage sons about possible careers in the law. I cannot pretend to these enthusiastic youngsters that what they have seen in movies or read in novels or even experienced through work placements will bear any relation to the legal world a generation hence. Can any responsible lawyer sensibly state with confidence that legal work in 2030 will be much the same as today?

While major oil companies have plans in place for the next 50 years, very few lawyers look beyond the next five. In fact, when honest lawyers are really pushed, most confess to being clueless about how their profession is likely to unfold in the long run.

And yet, in England alone, around 15,000 students each year are now being accepted by our universities to study law as undergraduates.

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Even if we concede that many of those students never intend to practise, we are nonetheless left with very large numbers (perhaps a quarter of a million in the next generation, at current rates) emerging from undergraduate law schools — institutions that generally seem to assume and project a model of legal practice that held firm in the mid to late 20th century but may well bear little relation to lawyering in the 21st.

I give lectures regularly at law schools and to legal academics. These talks often provoke interesting discussion, but I fear I am regarded by mainstream law professors as an interesting but ultimately misguided sophist and that trends such as commoditisation and IT are looked upon as marginal sideshows. Disconcertingly, undergraduate law students are also sceptical.

My ideas on the future of legal services may resonate with many general counsel in the world’s largest financial institutions and companies, and I may be asked to advise many law firms on possible futures, but most law schools, by and large, seem much less willing to engage. They are comfortable in assuming that it will be legal business as usual for the foreseeable future.

It is clear to me that few undergraduate law schools, in the UK at least, are exposing their students even to the possibility of that legal service may be radically different within the span of their careers.

What, then, are we training our undergraduate law students to become? What should we say to young aspiring, legal eagles about the landscape of the world they are interested in entering? To what reports or publications should we be directing them?

I can find none. For more than 15 years, I have been a general editor of the International Journal of Law and Information Technology; not once in that period have we received a submission on the subject of the nature of legal practice in the long term.

If law schools and legal academics are reluctant to express a long view about the future of law, are others stepping up to the plate? Remarkably, they do not seem to be. For example, professional bodies in England, such as the Law Society and the Bar Council, may currently be discussing or supporting or effecting changes that will substantially affect the future of lawyers but I can find no articulation of an underpinning vision for the future of legal service.

Similarly, the UK Government is unquestionably reforming the legal profession and legal system at a rate of knots but in none of the white papers, consultation documents or speeches by ministers can I find a clear articulation of a distant end game that takes into account the phenomena that most long-range strategic planners are wrestling with — such as the impact of outsourcing or of Web 2.0 (two phenomena that are disrupting and reconfiguring most sectors) on legal practice.

Nor has the Law Commission focused its lens on the future of legal practice. Even major law firms, who invest substantially in technology, very rarely look beyond the likely terms of office of their senior and managing partners, which tends to be between three and five years.

In short, no one who might be thought to be in the driving seat of the legal system is thinking systematically, rigorously and in a sustained way about the long term future of legal service. No-one seems to be worrying about the fate of the next generation of lawyers.

All that can be discerned in relation to the long term is a common assumption — whether on the part of scholars, professional bodies, government agencies or leading law firms — that legal service of tomorrow will be quite similar to that of today; perhaps more efficient and more business-like but not fundamentally different in nature.

It is assumed that legal guidance will continue to be dispensed by skilled professionals as a one-to-one, consultative advisory service. By and large, no discontinuities, transformations, upheavals, disruptions or revolutions in the nature of legal service are being contemplated.

One possible exception here is the legal publishing community, a market that has changed markedly in the last decade, in its widespread adoption of online techniques. I have found that many legal publishers, from the large and multi-jurisdictional to the small and entrepreneurial, do have a long term view, although it is not one they tend to publicise, for fear, perhaps, of swallowing the hand that feeds them.

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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