The slow-to-change nature of the legal profession is going to be put to the test in the coming months and years as external forces involving globalization, clients and regulation force the legal profession into a new model, panelists at an ALI-ABA ACLEA 2009 Summit in Arizona said last week.

The Legal Intelligencer monitored the summit via webcast.

"All of us are going to have to live in a world where everyone will be responsible for managing change," Corinne Cooper of Professional Presence in Tucson said.

And for Cooper, a former law school professor herself, a big part of that change is going to be forced upon the law schools. She said she viewed the law school profession when she was in it as "manufacturers." The law schools manufactured lawyers and the law firms bought the product and retooled it for their uses.

"Law firms will start acting like the clients of law schools and will ask the law schools to deliver a product that is more useful to them," Cooper said, adding later, "Those days of the Ivory Tower being a manufacturing plant that was largely immune to [outside sources] are over."

Panelist Ward Bower of Altman Weil said the recent deferral of law school graduates is a losing proposition for the graduates and the firms. The industry is more likely to see reduced starting salaries combined with apprentice programs moving forward. While firms will still have to write off time in that model, it will be a more affordable investment than paying the higher salaries, Bower said.

Harry Arthurs, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in Toronto, said training a lawyer requires having a certain model of a lawyer in mind. The profession is splitting into several professions in one, he said, and training can be offered to suit different needs. He said he was comfortable with the notion of a two-year law school, but said there could be a six-year law school that would target a different type of clientele the lawyer was looking to serve.

"It's absurd to say you can learn as much in two years as in six," he said.

Cooper said that type of extended training is already being done through LL.M programs and other continuing education.

"We're making them take three years, but trust me, I've been a law professor, and we can do it in two," she said.

Cooper said she and many others have looked at the idea of using the third year as an apprenticeship year.

Stuart Forsyth of The Legal Futurist in Los Angeles said it doesn't much matter whether the curriculum lasts two years or three. The important thing is that there is major change in how law school is taught. And if it takes switching to a two-year model for schools to start thinking about those changes, then so be it.

BEYOND LAW SCHOOL

For the industry as a whole, change is coming most dramatically from three areas, Bower said.

The globalization of clients will continue to force even small firms to deal with matters abroad or represent foreign clients in the United States. Large and quick law firms will have the competitive advantage, he said, but smaller firms can compete with the use of technology.

Another big change that is already in the works is the switch to a buyer's market. Law firms used to be the ones dictating how matters would be staffed and priced, but that is no longer, Bower said. Sophisticated clients are demanding that first- and second-year associates stay off their matters. They are also off-shoring work themselves or demanding their law firms do it, Bower said.

Perhaps the most dramatic change that is further down the road is one Bower called the "ticking time bomb" overseas. That is the U.K.'s Legal Services Act of 2007, which when it takes effect will allow law firms to raise capital like a public company.

"We've got an impending regulatory revolution coming and it's going to be on a global scale," he said.

To think the Legal Services Act won't affect the U.S. legal market could be a mistake. There are 125 U.S. law firms with London offices, Bower said. As soon as cash comes into those London firms, they might look to lure away talent from the U.S. firms based there, putting U.S. firms at a competitive disadvantage, he said.

U.K. firms might also look to create nationalized practices more akin to a "legal Walmart," which could have a dramatic effect here and overseas, he said.

The concept of multidisciplinary practices, where lawyers and non-lawyers work together generating revenues for the same business, is one that will arise in the United States again and again, Bower said. Sophisticated clients typically don't care about issues relating to lawyer independence and potential conflicts that could arise out of MDPs, he said.

Forsyth said he sees the profession splitting into two. The larger firms will become larger as they combine -- a phenomenon he said is familiar to many maturing industries. But it can't be forgotten that about 60 percent of the legal profession is composed of solo or small-firm practitioners. He said technology will level the playing field for them. The problem, however, is that, politically, the structures are driven by the large law firm profession.

Arthurs said there will be more than two professions. He said there has been a "huge proliferation of practice roles." That makes it difficult for law schools to predict what a graduate will do in his professional life and means there is no one-size-fits-all in terms of teaching professional competency. Arthurs said the industry will ultimately end up recognizing multiple professions with different client bases and different models.

The panel, moderated by Cobalt's Tsan Abrahamson, spent a lot of time discussing the future of continuing legal education.

Most agreed the education wasn't getting it done because it brought in talking heads who weren't good educators to discuss topics of little relevance.

Bower said he would drop the "L" from CLE and focus instead on business training. The biggest complaint Bower said he hears from corporate counsel about their outside law firms is a lack of commercial knowledge. He said lawyers would be better off learning about business than attending another antitrust seminar.

"I don't think there's anything more valuable than the lawyer taking the time to learn the client's business," Bower said.

Cooper said outside counsel need to change the focus from "I" to "thou." Instead of focusing on their expertise, lawyers need to center their thinking on their clients' needs.