Richard Susskind, U.K.-based legal futurist either you drink his Kool Aid or you don’t. Those who don’t contend that his dire predictions of the end of the legal profession are baseless. They assert that advancements in technology and institutional change haven’t significantly changed the day-to-day the practice of law, because lawyers are trusted advisors to and advocates for their clients functions that can neither be outsourced to untrained personnel nor duplicated by machines.
Susskind refers to this resistant segment of lawyers as "the jealous guard" in his most recent book, "Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future." He argues that these naysayers are motivated by selfish, short-term concerns with little regard for the long-term strategic health of their law firms or the legal profession: "(M)ost senior lawyers . . . will tend to be cautious, protective, conservative, if not reactionary. They will resist change and will often want to hang on to their traditional ways of working, even if they are well past their sell-by date. . . . Operating as managers rather than leaders, they are more focused on short-term profitability."
