To say, as I do, that the American legal profession is ponderous and backward-looking is no slam on individual lawyers. In describing the legal profession as resistant to change and determined to cling to its own status quo and past, I prescribe a controversial cure for the profession’s recalcitrance: Engage the expertise of creative nonlawyers in the management of the profession itself. In times of change and challenge, some individual lawyers have seen change around them and adjusted and some have not. But never has the profession seen change and adjusted. Instead, the profession as an entity has acted as if it had eyes on the back of its head. But none on the front.
My recent book, The American Legal Profession in Crisis: Resistance and Responses to Change, has received some electronic attention from The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. The blogosphere’s attention so far has focused on the last chapter of the book, in which I offer some possible remedies for this disease. The most controversial remedy that I suggest is that nonlawyers such as creative managers of cultural, economic, technology and business trends should be enlisted to take a role in managing the legal profession (not managing any individual lawyer’s work) to help the profession move forward with the flow of the society it claims to serve. For its own self-interest, the profession should welcome their input and even cede some measure of power to them. In exchange, the legal profession would become a more positive force in the change that inevitably comes.
