The evolution of the legal services market Stage 1.doc

The evolution of the legal services market: Stage 1 By Jordan Furlong ? Published: November 5th, 2012 SHARE:Tweet INSHARE14 I recently delivered my 15th and final presentation of 2012 about the changing legal market. Over the past 12 months, I’ve given speeches and keynote addresses to large firm retreats, sole practitioners, bar leaders and regulators, chief justices, law students, CLE providers, law librarians, and other groups and organizations throughout the United States and Canada. If I had one piece of advice to share from all these excursions, it would be that you will never regret bringing backup versions of everything electronic, especially should you accidentally spill a full bottle of water onto your laptop just before a presentation. I haven’t just been speaking to these groups, however; I’ve also been listening to what these diverse stakeholders in the legal marketplace have to say. And I’ve taken away two sets of impressions. The first is that a very wide spectrum of knowledge and perspective exists regarding the nature of change in the legal market. I’ve met lawyers and legal professionals who flatly dismiss any suggestion that the market is changing in ways that are revolutionary and permanent. I’ve met others who saw these trends developing years ago and have already re-engineered their businesses to adapt. The vast majority of audience members lie somewhere in between. Most of the people I’ve spoken with, however, have been surprisingly and encouragingly interested in what’s going on in the wider legal world and what it might mean for them. My second takeaway, and the one I’d like to explore in greater depth over the next five days, is that there’s no real consensus within the legal market about just what’s happening to it. We don’t appear to have a collective sense of what kind of road we’re traveling, where it’s taking us, and at what stage of the trip we currently find ourselves. This is important, because without a shared understanding of