Mark Raskino

The Gartner Fellows maintain an occasional research report for clients called ‘the Research Incubator’. Its a journal of unconventional thinking. We use it to capture leading edge analyst research thinking that is partly formed, challenging, orthogonal or is important but simply doesn’t fit into our existing structures and coverage.  In the July 2007 edition (G00150326) my colleague John Bace wrote the following:

“The legal profession will soon find itself at a crossroads with regard to adopting and embracing technology in the practice of law. Down one path, technology will innovate, providing attorneys with powerful tools that can help ferret out key facts in discovery, illustrate complex thoughts to win arguments, and calculate with uncanny precision the probabilities in awards and decisions. However, at the same time, the adoption of other technologies that mostly automate will drive the legal profession into an information service with a commodity product and pricing. Self-service kiosks for filings, Web-based legal advice and virtual hearings/proceedings all have the same hallmarks as the milestones passed by other companies, professions and industries on the way to commoditization.”

This week I listened to a very interesting radio documentary on BBC radio 4 which made essentially the same point – but with couple of important twists. Firstly, that deregulation of some parts of legal practice will allow more, lower skilled, people into the market. Secondly, that recession would compel legal firms to consider ways of bringing costs and prices down. In ‘Law in Action: A World Without Lawyers?’, legal IT specialist Richard Suskind was interviewed and he explained how, what I would still call ‘expert systems’ are coming into legal practice situations. These systems can take away much of the simpler work previously undertaken by legally qualified people at significant hourly rates. This is exactly what John Bace was pointing to back in 2007.

So perhaps it’s not only fast food workers who should be concerned about the job automation wave we might see catalysed by this recession. White collar professionals should think about how much rote, repetetitive and standardised work they rely on in their jobs. In this case, some of the legal task work, such as raising document drafts can be done on a self-service basis by the client themselves interacting with an online system and supported by paralegal staff.

P.S.  I heard the UK BBC program on my laptop over WiFi in a California hotel room. Live radio from home is a ‘death of distance’ internet experience that never fails to make me smile.