Drills and holes: Difference between revisions

{{quote|“I don’t think it works like that at all. You see an electric drill in a shop and decide you want it. Then you take it home and wander around your house looking for excuses to drill holes in things.”

:—Llewelyn Thomas, quoted in {{author|Rory Sutherland}}’s {{br|Alchemy}}}}

The customer wanting a hole, not a drill, is a favourite trope of legal futurologist Professor Richard Susskind.<ref>See {{br|The Future of Law}} (1996; now out of print)</ref> The message for those involved in the legal profession is this: it is unlikely that users of the legal system are irreversibly tied to how the law currently works. Clients want outcomes — how the machinery by which these outcomes are delivered ''works'' is of little interest to them; what matters is (i) that the outcome works; (ii) that it is cost-effective; (iii) that it is quick. All this nonsense with law reports, dusty legal opinions, horsehair wigs and so on is just so much bunk. No-one wants it. Susskind intones: heed this warning, or you will be driven out of business.

There is nothing about the information revolution that makes possible alternative legal process outsourcing where it was not possible before. Some forms of legal process outsourcing — typing and secretarial work, proof-reading, couriers, mailrooms, prospectus printing services, even media and marketing services — have actually vanished. Lawyers type their own stuff now. They send their own email. They manage their own branding and do their own webcasts of the same dreary [[continuing professional development|seminars]]. All of these changes have happened iteratively, by the effluxion of time and the gradual change of behaviours, not by revolution.

There is the challenge that faces Professor Susskind, legal industry thought-leaders and smug self-publishing wiki-writers alike: how do we change the institutions to make them more effective, more efficient, less of a gravy train, less ''preposterous''?