Glass Half Full: The Decline and Rebirth of the Legal Profession, 0816 COBJ, Vol. 45, No. 8 Pg. 69
| Author | Eli Wald, J. |
Reviews of Legal Resources
Eli Wald, J.
Book Review: Glass Half Full: The Decline and Rebirth of the Legal Profession
Benjamin H. Barton 305 pp.; $29.95 Oxford University Press, 2015 198 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016 (800) 445-9714; http://global.oup.com/?cc=us
The legal profession appears to be in decline: many recent law school graduates are unemployed or underemployed, and some lawyers struggle to keep their practices afloat, facing on the one hand reduced demand for their services and on the other hand increased competition from nonlawyers, outsourcing, and even artificial intelligence. Add the need to keep abreast with fast-moving technological advances and their associated risks (like cybersecurity), mix in concerns about insufficient access for those who cannot afford to pay for legal services and complaints about the shrinking role of lawyers as public citizens, and you might walk away with a pretty grim perspective about the future of law practice.
How is a busy practitioner to make sense of the state of the legal profession and assess the impact of these challenges on one’s law practice? Reading Benjamin Barton’s G lass Half Full is a good starting point. Barton, a legal ethics professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law, effectively summarizes four types of competitive challenges faced by lawyers:
1. increased competition and instability experienced by large law firms, which in turn reduces their previously large recruitment needs and affects other segments of the profession as new cohorts of lawyers, especially recent graduates, increasingly look for employment elsewhere (chapter 4);
2. increased competition experienced by solo practitioners and small firms from increasingly sophisticated technology and artificial intelligence providers like LegalZoom, which offer cheap(er) alternatives to traditional legal services, especially for basic, standardized, and easily commodified matters (chapter 5);
3. increased regulatory interference with traditional means of law practice (such as tort reform efforts), more imposing pleading requirements, and funding cutbacks for subsidized legal services, which decrease lawyers’ profit margins and access to lawyers (chapter 6); and
4. increased supply-side competition as the...
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