The legal world is rapidly changing due to an increasingly competitive business environment; the availability of new technology, such as application service providers (ASPs), web TV and the internet; ‘legal profession-specific’ technology such as case management systems; and sociological change.
The main changes to the legal world have been driven by competition. In the search for increasing competitiveness, all areas of the delivery of legal services have been scrutinised and the legal world is continuing to evolve, first through procedures and then processes.
With the procedurisation of the legal process came the development of IT-based applications to help with this. Case management systems have helped automate these newly-designed processes providing the firm with the basis for a fundamental change in the delivery of legal services.
The process of delivering a legal service could then be ‘productised’ and the products compared so one firm’s process could be directly compared to another’s and the best one selected by the customer.
A knock-on effect of this could be that law firms can think about selling their processes to each other, so that a small firm can access the expertise of a large firm.
Other changes in the legal landscape
In the short term, the Woolf reforms will lead to a drop in litigation revenue as firms settle more cases and use less resources to go through the courts. But another Woolf spin-off will be that the use of procedures and processes will be more acceptable to the average firm.
The increased take-up of internet access will lead to an increase in the use of legal services. This can be seen as demand-led (or customer-driven) as customers get used to buying legal services the way they would buy any other product via the internet, or product-led, as the law firms adopt e-commerce and try to sell their services via the internet.
Web-TV technology, where the internet browser can be accessed via a home TV, coupled with video-on-demand pricing mechanisms, will lead to near 100% access to the internet within five years. This will also mean that even the smallest business can have internet access. The latest generation of end-tier application development tools will mean any application can be provided through the latest browser technology, and applications can also be provided via web TV.
Internet-led charging mechanisms, currently creating ASPs, will also change the way applications are used by the customer, and applications will be paid for on a usage basis rather than bought outright.
The increased acceptance of the outsourcing of facilities management (FM) will lead to a greater acceptance of both IT services being managed externally and the IT infrastructure (hardware, data and applications) being held offsite. The market already accepts that an internet service provider can hold an organisation’s web pages, therefore increasing the likelihood of external IT management happening.
The above technologies could also lead to great social change and a revolution in working place technology. People may no longer work in city-based offices; but they may not want to work from home either. This could lead to a huge growth in what would be called multi-occupancy local business utilities (Molbys): offices where pools of workers would go to work.
Communications technology would enable customers to access executives and for each organisation to retain its brand identity, so customers would be given the law firm’s telephone number and the calls would be routed to the correct hot desk within the Molby, even when up to 50 different executives from 50 different firms were using the facility. In addition, printed business mail will have virtually disappeared, having been replaced by e-mail as the dominant medium.
It is likely that there will be more deregulation in the legal market, starting with the acceptance of multi-disciplinary practices (MDPs). In the case of buying a house, the client will no longer have to visit their lawyer, their chartered surveyor and their mortgage adviser separately. The mindset behind the transaction would change too, from ‘I need a mortgage, legal advice and a survey’ to ‘I want to buy a house and I will visit my local MDP to do the lot’.
