Seeking for innovation in the delivery of legal services leads naturally to an examination of small business of lawyering, as opposed to the practice of law, and there is a big range of prospective new business enterprise models to be thought of.

Numerous of these are touched on in Richard Susskind’s perform, like his 2009 The End of Lawyers. One of Susskind’s fundamental points is that a lot of what lawyers do is repetitive and not especially intelligent or creative. In a organization context, we generally refer to anything that is high volume, low skill, repetitive work as a commodity, and in the company globe it is a nicely identified pattern that most products have a life-cycle that ends in commoditization.

Certainly this could not take place to one particular of the world’s oldest professions? Susskind tends to make a fantastic case that it can and will happen to large chunks of what is presently viewed as to be the practice of law-in any case exactly where lawyers’ operate can reliably be lowered to a course of action.

In the UK for example it is possible to incorporate a new firm on line in significantly less than an hour for about 120.85€ and some weeks later you get your corporate record books in the post, total with the minutes of your 1st shareholders and directors meetings Legalzoom.com in the United States is offering similar services there. The very same sort of on line small business can most likely be done with any legal small business that is principally kind-filling. Contemplate Deed of Variation without Will Intestacy Document of this for immigration law, for example.

A a lot more sophisticated version of this model currently exists in the a substantial number of what are referred to as legal “factories”, which at their greatest are web-sites where members of the public enter their personal information which is analyzed by simple software that determines no matter whether they have the type of case that is profitable to the legal solutions provider. If they do then the information is then passed on to a team of paralegals for further processing, even though the paralegals are supervised by a compact number of lawyers at the top of the pyramid. Personal injury, divorce (quickie-divorce.com!), and unfair dismissal claims are all being processed this way in the UK, and in the US Legalzoom.com covers wills, divorce, and even patent filings with a equivalent model.

The clear criticism of this sort of model is that it high-grades the simplest and easiest circumstances so that the “law firm” can make the most money for the least work. This is anathema to those lawyers who pride themselves on carrying out good and inventive operate for customers who most want their assist. Even so, the better view is that simply because these commoditized small business models can deliver simple solutions so cheaply, they offer access to legal services to that big majority of the public who could never otherwise afford to employ a lawyer.

Off-shoring legal function to India or other low-expense economies (legal procedure outsourcing, or “LPO”) is yet another class of small business models. The LPO business in India is only six years old, but it is currently worth 124.38€+ million in annual sales. There are some pretty large law firm and corporate consumers (Microsoft, and Rio Tinto for instance) who are receiving excellent final results, and in IP it is becoming a pretty nicely recognized path-prior art searches and patent invalidity analyses are regularly completed in India. The financial forces pulling towards LPO are overwhelming, and LPO alone has the possible to both revolutionize and globalize the delivery of legal services around the planet.

Additionally, the tentative trend established in the UK towards allowing non-lawyer ownership of law firms has implications for extra dramatic adjust, such as IPOs of international firms or the entry of hedge funds these scenarios raise nearly as many issues about ethics as they do possibilities for innovation.