Gillian Hadfield writing for Law.com has a closer look at what Susskind is saying in his latest offering on the state of legal education.
Like Hadfield we agree with most of what he says but we’d suggest looking at the changes in the world of tech and law over the last 24 months, we believe it’s all about demographics.
Those with the tech savvy are still probably just a little too young to persuade the elders to hand over cash for great new tech disrupters in the legal sector and we don’t mean the Lexis Nexis typesponsored pretend disrupters, but the real thing.
We just need more Dragon Laws’ (HK), Judicatas’ (California) and Robot Lawyers’ aka Joshua Browder to come online and things will change quickly as tech is developed for the new generation of lawyers who understand social media and apps rather than 20th century inspired solutions for a new legal market.
Susskind does not mince words: Today’s law graduates “are staggeringly ill-prepared for the legal world of the next decade or two.” There’s a need to be blunt—the problem is urgent and almost no one involved in the practice or teaching of law wants to hear it.
If I have a critique of the excerpt presented here—and I’m pretty sure Susskind would not disagree, as elsewhere he emphasizes the problems of access to justice—it is that it remains trained on Big Law. Susskind has done more than any other observer of the practice of law to publicize how Big Law is changing and the impact of technology in particular. And Big Law is big: In 2012 in the U.S. (the last year for which the economic census produced data) the top 8 percent of law firms accounted for 75 percent of all law firm revenues. It’s no wonder that the great majority of legal tech, and attention, is devoted to the Big Law slice of the market. But those law firms are where we find only about 15 percent of lawyers. Probably another 5 percent are employed directly in-house at large corporations. But that means 80 percent of our law graduates are headed elsewhere—government, smaller businesses and non-profits, and, primarily, solo and small practice. What those graduates need is not the same as what those headed to big corporate practice need. Too much of our legal educational model, however, is based on the idea that we can teach law students how to analyze appellate cases and research black-letter law, but they will learn the skills needed for practice when they become junior associates in law firms—which most don’t.
But my bigger worry is that next-to-zero percent of our current graduates are employed in the legal businesses of the future: the legal technology companies that serve ordinary citizens, help governments regulate self-driving cars and global financial systems, and deliver (for example) blockchain-based transactional and identification platforms that link the four billion living around the world outside of the rule of law to the engine of global commerce. As I’ve argued in my own recent book, “Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy,” we are in need of transformative legal innovation. And we need to be educating the people who can invent that future. We’re not. Yes, we should be educating some of our young lawyers to be much more effective partners to big global businesses—schooled in legal technology, risk management and project management, and some to be better solo, small firm, and government lawyers. But we also need to be educating the young people who can invent the legal infrastructure we need for a world that is ever-more organized through artificial intelligence, global networks, and the challenges in countries rich and poor of diversity and inclusion.
» Susskind on Legal Education: Reactions from Law School Leaders
