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| {{essay|design|drills and holes|{{image|Machinery|png|A hole-in-your-pocket drilling machine, yesterday.}} | | {{essay|design|drills and holes|{{image|Machinery|png|A hole-in-your-pocket drilling machine, yesterday.}} }} |
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| === No-one got fired for hiring Big Law ===
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| The first thing to say is that this observation — that people want outcomes and don’t really care about the machinery that delivers them — is hardly new. It does not depend for its validity upon the [[information revolution]].
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| If it is true that we want holes not drills, it was as true in 1790 as it was in 1996, as it is today.
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| ''If''.
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| But it is Llewelyn Thomas’s quip that has the ring of truth.
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| We go to [[Allen & Overy]] ''not'' because it gives the best advice, but ''because it is [[Allen & Overy]]''. Ex-[[Magic circle law firm|magic circle]] [[partner]]<nowiki/>s routinely find this to their disappointment when the phone stops ringing.
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| It isn’t the ''hole'' people want: ''it’s the drill''. We can believe this is not so, but only by denying facts as they ''appear'' to us in favour of a mental model that ''appeals'' to us.
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| === Law as a [[complex system]] ===
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| The legal ecosystem developed in the way it did not ''despite'' customer demand but ''in response to it''. But not just customer demand: practitioner demand, societal demands and all the other multifarious demands, contingencies, [[Power structure|hierarchies]] and doctrines that the wider [[complex system|system]]. The legal system is, well, a ''[[system]]'': a web of [[complex]] interactions: stocks, flows and feedback loops, subroutines, submerged agendas and [[Conflicts of interest|conflicting interest]]<nowiki/>s that push it into a gently morphing pseudo-equilibrium.
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| Re-imagining this whole system from scratch through the lens of a four-box quadrant ignores the institutions, conventions, [[Power structure|hierarchies]] and deeply ingrained structures, embedded in glacial [[Pace layering|pace layers]] — the ways we have all worked out of comfortably working — that are there, in significant part, to protect the system from sudden shocks and, yes, to protect the selfish interests of the multitudes that presently thrive within it. They deliver [[certainty]]. They provide the stability that is necessary to deliver a reliable hole in the wall, or — if that is what the customer wants — that deliver a shiny new drill with lots of buttons, lights and a badge saying “[[magic circle]] certified fresh{{tm}}” on it.
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| Revolutions are not ''driven'' by industry [[thought leader]]s. Revolutions put “intellectuals” up against a wall — usually, one that already has holes in it.
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| === The internet, disintermediation and the scope for legal process outsourcing ===
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| One of the great themes of the information revolution is the network’s power to [[Disintermediation|disintermediate]]. There is nothing particular about the internet that makes possible alternative legal process outsourcing where it was not before. To the contrary, [[outsourcing]] is a form of ''re''intermediation: generally, instead of leading to [[outsourcing]], technology promises to remove the [[intermediary]] altogether.<ref>Isn’t that a funny thing, by the way? As we have gradually embraced technology, intermediarisation has ''exploded''. This is called “[[cognitive dissonance]]”.</ref>
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| As it has done: some forms of legal process outsourcing have been obliterated, though it’s a done deal now, we have banked it, so [[thought leader]]s tend not to talk about it. But secretarial work, proof-reading, couriers, mailrooms, prospectus printing services, even media and marketing services — have vanished. Lawyers type their own stuff now.<ref>When the [[JC]] was a young clerk in short pants he asked for a terminal, and was told, “we don’t pay lawyers to type, son.”</ref> They send their own [[email]]. They manage their own branding, do their own webcasts of the same dreary [[continuing professional development|seminars]]. They even host podcasts. All of these changes have happened iteratively, by the effluxion of time and the gradual change of behaviours, not by revolution.
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| === This doesn’t make it okay ===
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| Now none of this is not to say a great deal of the legal work product is not preposterous. It is. ''Most'' of it. What is more, it is demonstrably ''more'' preposterous than it was thirty years ago: there are more lawyers, legal agreements are longer, legal prose ever more tortured, [[La Vittoria della Forma sulla Sostanza|form ever more imperiously towers over substance]] — and technology has been the ''enabler'' here. The profession has used the tools of the information revolution to ''further complicate'' everything.
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| The problems with law today are ''not'' technological, and technology cannot solve them. They are ''sociological'' problems. They are deep. They stem from inherent [[agency problem]]s that arise in any intermediation activity. The arise from natural barrier-protection behaviour that goes on around all substantial [[Paradigm|paradigms]] and [[power structure]]s, and the practice of law is a heavily-fortified, deeply-entrenched power structure.
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| The doubtlessly well-intended efficiencies that [[Modernism|modern(ist) management theory]] promise and the the new vistas the information revolution have opened have multiplied the opportunities to defend the existing structure. Technology can be deployed to defend power structures just as easily as to dissolve them, and those within the orthodoxy have the resources to do it.
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| There is the challenge that faces legal industry thought-leaders and [[JC|smug self-publishing wiki-writers]] alike: how to get inside that hay-maker cultural punch? How to bring long-term change to deeply embedded behaviours and change institutions to make them more effective, more efficient, less of a gravy train, less ''preposterous''?
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