In recent years, the legal world has witnessed a revolution that continues to unfold before our very eyes. The seeds of this change began with the Internet boom in the late 1990s, which yielded seamless connectivity with anyone in the world and spawned a host of new applications that enabled professionals to use industrial processes and tools to deliver services in a scalable manner. The recession of the early 2000s catalyzed this change by placing corporate legal departments under unprecedented pressure to run their function like a business unit, delivering higher levels of service and driving costs down. The legal departments responded by investing in a broad array of automation technologies, leveraging a mix of domestic and off-shore alternative legal service providers, bringing more work in house and demanding that their law firms provide better value propositions.
Historically, lawyers received training in legal doctrine and theory in law school and then learned their practical skills as associates at law firms through on-the-job training that was billed to clients. With many clients no longer seeing value in this approach, law firms drastically curtailed their hiring of recent law graduates. The impact of these changes on law graduates and law schools has been well chronicled and includes high rates of lawyer unemployment, high debt loads and declining law school applications and enrollment.
