There is no going back. Whether or not we accept the thesis put forward by Richard Susskind in his ground-breaking book, The Future of Law in 1996, legal practice has been heavily impacted by IT information and computer technology (ICT) in the past seven years and, agree with Susskind or not, almost every lawyer has a view on the next short-term gain (or loss) that ICT will inflict on the practice of law.
It is therefore of vital concern to look again at Susskind’s major statements about change to see how, in this relatively short term, his projections are faring. It is also interesting to look at his ideas in the context of what has happened since he wrote: what was unforeseeable then was the huge public enthusiasm for internet services that spawned a boom in speculative service provision which would overheat and then cool in the first years of the new century to a much more gradual acceptance of change. So does the internet boom/bust cycle affect his theory about the emergence of law as an information service?
