Changes in the Legal Landscape
This year is going to see a great deal of change in the legal profession. It's not going to be extreme or drastic but the economic climate will have an impact as much on us as everyone else. Not that I'm all doom and gloom because to some extent, the changes being forced upon us are inevitable, but it's going to hurt.
What we've got now is a situation where there are loads of professionals sitting around with not enough work to do. Imagine you are a conveyancing solicitor in London. Do you think they are going to be busy? Almost certainly not. But if you do employment, litigation, or rather more obviously, insolvency, then you are currently manically busy and supporting the rest of the firm.
What this actually means in reality is unclear. The Law Society Gazette (the Law Society's official weekly publication) reported back in December 2008 that some 1,250 firms were in "financial intensive care" with their banks. There's no definition of what that actually means, but the inference is clear. Law firms are not all cash rich and some will start to go under.
Even the President of the Law Society recognises that there will be change. "My instinct tells me, after the current recession, the legal landscape witll look very different. The profession must now anticipate quite how different it might look to ensure there there is a properly remunerated independent legal profession to protect the rule of law on the other side."
What all this means for clients is unclear, but my strong sense is that it will push forward the move towards commoditisation which Richard Susskind has been talking about for a few years because even the heavyweight commercial clients will be looking to cut costs. And it will force lawyers to reinvent themselves, if they haven't done so already. Very few of my contemporaries are doing what they started out doing 20 years ago and that rate of change will accelerate. This firm will have to adapt as well, and I intend to look at ways we will be doing that in the next few weeks.
