A senior partner asked me last week if I thought there was a revolution about to upset the world of law. It would make better copy if I’d have said yes, but my answer was no. Obviously, legal services will keeping evolving and the UK will continue to be the most liberal and dynamic market in world. There will be commoditisation, and it will be surprising if some form of Tesco law does not emerge over the next 10 years (although it probably won’t be Tesco doing it). Internationalisation of legal services will continue, though we are now entering a period of polishing up and reorganising foreign practices, rather than the scattergun expansion of the 1990s.
The impact of outside investment under the Legal Services Act is unknowable with so many variables at play. I will say this: for high-end legal services, the more I hear financiers talk it up, the less convinced I am. Technology will keep changing the profession, but probably not in the way everyone is expecting it, because that’s what tends to happen with technology. But none of these forces are remotely new. Law has gone through wrenching change over the last 50 years and will do again.
