Tag: Lawyers in the Future

COVID-19 Pandemic is Rocking our Legal Profession

Lawyers need to Adapt

COVID-19 has abruptly brought our world to a screeching halt. We can all agree that the post-pandemic world will be different, and the legal practice will not be an exception.   As we continue to be apart and try to overcome the global pandemic, it’s easy to become despondent about what the future waves of the virus will wage upon us as we absorb the sobering fact that a majority of will catch the virus and thousands of people will die.

Lawyers – like everyone else dealing with the pandemic – cannot delude themselves into thinking this is a short-term problem.  The global pandemic will have a profound and lasting effect on the world and the practice. Rather than think about the grim statistics, we need to focus on the purpose of our practice and how to perform the work we have been trained to do.  We must stay safe, healthy, keep in touch with loved ones and – most importantly – look at the situation as an opportunity to modernize how we deliver services.

For several years I have been talking about using technology in the practice and adapting to the tsunami of changes tech is bringing to our society. We have ignored and resisted the technological changes that are changing the way we practice.

It is no longer enough to use e-filing, email, video conferencing, video-based court hearings, and e-signatures. We must move to the cloud, learn to work easily from home, adapt to video-based mediations, and get comfortable with remote teaching, and then we have to move further down the road of advancing the practice. There has to be a more serious approach and greater thought given to how we will be practicing law in the future.

This will require a complete change in paradigm of the practice.

  • The portion of society that solos and small firms service – the middle class – will be devastated by the pandemic. Already the stock market crash has taken about 25% of the retirement portfolio, over 4,000,000 people will be applying for unemployment, supply chains are being stretched to the limit, and a global recession is not far away.   So, who will be able to afford legal services?
    • We will have to work harder to get justice for the people most affected by the collapse of the economy.
    • More businesses will be going bankrupt.
    • More retail space will become vacant.
  • Embracing technology beyond Zoom and video conferencing and moving into collaborative technology.
  • Remote working, online courts, eLibraries, digital signatures, case management and knowledge management are now mandatory.
  • Increased use of electronically stored information (ESI).
  • Accepting artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, predictive analytics which have already disrupted the legal market.

And through this tsunami of effects, where will lawyers stand? Will we be sitting on the beach catching some rays as the tsunami overcomes us?  Will we be like the lobster who gets washed up onto a rock and refuses to move the several inches to the ocean to survive?

If we are the leaders that we profess to be, then let’s lead.  Let’s find some answers. Let’s propose new systems for helping solve legal problems and serving the community.  Or we can all become Uber drivers (at least until drivers are still needed)

There are lots of directions we can take individually and creative, innovative steps the bar can take, but whatever we do, we need to move now!  I don’t have all the answers, but I refuse to be drowned by the tsunami that has hit us.  We need to start be the leaders of society which lawyers have been recognized to be.

 

Future of the Practice – Part 2: How Can Lawyers Better Serve the Public?

To survive and thrive in the 21st century, and to continue serving the public adequately, attorneys can no longer muddle through with business as usual.

Wide swaths of the public are unable to get their legal needs met. Innovations in technology and other changes in society continue to shift how legal services can be accessed and delivered. Bias, complexity, discrimination and lack of resources undermine the public’s trust and confidence in the justice system.

These were the top concerns raised a couple years ago by the American Bar Association’s Commission on the Future of Legal Services, which also made several recommendations on solving these conundrums that seem well worth considering. Doing so, the commission wrote, would bring about the “significant change … needed to serve the public’s legal needs in the 21st century.”

Although there have been sustained efforts to expand access, most of those in poverty and the majority of moderate-income people cannot afford representation, the commission found. This means the public fails to obtain effective assistance and litigants come to court unrepresented, which adversely impacts all parties involved. At the same time, many lawyers, especially younger ones, are unemployed or underemployed, hemmed in by the traditional practice business model and the profession’s resistance to change, the ABA noted.

Technological and other innovations to assist the public in meeting their legal needs include experimental projects on the part of courts, bar associations, law schools and some lawyers, in areas like artificial intelligence, alternative billing and unbundled legal services. Against this backdrop, new providers of legal services continue to proliferate and create different choices for consumers and lawyers, the commission pointed out.

Public trust and confidence is undermined by the facts that the profession fails to reflect the diversity of the public, conscious and unconscious bias stands in the way of fairness and justice, the system’s functioning remains opaque to the average person, the criminal justice system is overburdened by mass incarceration and inadequate resources, and inadequate funding of courts on behalf of federal and state governments, the commission wrote.

The ABA Commission put forth a series of a dozen recommendations to help solve these stubborn challenges. For lawyers and law firms, these include supporting the goal of providing some type of effective assistance for all “essential civil legal needs” regardless of a person’s ability to pay, keeping abreast of relevant technologies, partnering with those in other disciplines and the public to gain insights about innovations in service delivery, and working to advance diversity and inclusion through updated policies, standards and practices.

To reform the court system, the commission recommended considering regulatory innovations such as exploring how legal services are delivered by Internet-based platforms and through alternative business structures. Courts also should become more accessible physically and virtually, through streamlined processes, multilingual materials and alternative dispute resolution systems, the ABA recommended.

Elsewhere in the public sphere, the commission recommended reforming the criminal justice system by decriminalizing minor offenses and adequately funding public defender offices, among other changes; vastly expanding resources to support longstanding efforts to successfully address the public’s unmet needs through legal aid and pro bono efforts; and measuring the outcomes of any established or new models “to evaluate effectiveness in fulfilling regulatory objectives.”

As for the ABA itself, the commission recommended that it establish a Center for Innovation, create guidelines for state bar associations and others to develop and administer “legal checkups” for attorneys and law firms, and, along with other bar associations, to “make the examination of the future of legal services part of their ongoing strategic long-range planning.”

Which seems wise, because however thoughtful and well considered, one bar association report is not going to singlehandedly change legal services delivery in a way that solves the access and trust problem while assisting unemployed and underemployed attorneys. But a persistent, strategic effort just might stand a chance.