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| {{a|design|{{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.}} |
| }}{{quote|We don’t want to sell you Life Insurance . . we want you to know and have ''what life insurance will do''. A 1/4 million drills were sold last year: no one wants a [[drills and holes|drill]]. What they want is the hole. | | }} |
| :—The ''Manhattan Mutual Life Company'' advertisement, Manhattan Kansas, 1946}}
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| {{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.”
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| :—Llewelyn Thomas, quoted in {{author|Rory Sutherland}}’s {{br|Alchemy}}}}
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| {{quote|“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
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| :—{{author|Mark Twain}}}}
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| That a customer wants a hole, not a drill, is a favourite trope of legal futurologists. Their message: do not assume that users of the legal system are irrevocably tied to how it currently works. Clients want ''outcomes.'' How the legal machinery by which these outcomes are delivered ''works'' is of little interest to them; what matters is that the outcome ''works'', it is ''cheap'' and it is ''quick''.
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| So: all this carry-on with [[Jolly Contrarian Law Reports|law report]]s, dusty [[legal opinion]]s, horsehair wigs and so on is incidental bunk. No-one, necessarily, wants it. Heed the rational moderniser’s refrain or risk being driven out of business.
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| === Come the revolution — ===
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| We have been hearing these warnings for twenty-five years. You would think someone [[Digital prophet|visionary]] would long since have revolutionised the legal market.
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| But — and, look, it’s easy to be wise in hindsight, readers, but let’s do it anyway — the anticipated “seismic shifts” in legal industry are taking a long time to happen.
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| To be sure, in the meantime the legal market has ''incrementally'' changed: it has [[Change adoption|absorbed every innovation]] — [[fax]], [[email]], [[internet]], mobile telephony, [[BlackBerry|mobile internet]], cloud computing, [[Downgrading|offshoring]], [[outsourcing]], and it is currently embedding what it can of [[neural network]]s and [[natural language processing]] — ''but not really in the ways that the [[thought leader]]s had in mind''.
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| But all this change notwithstanding, it is an ongoing source of frustration for the legal imagineers that the fundamental structures of the legal profession ''haven’t'' been revolutionised. They’ve ''rolled with the punches''. [[Clifford Chance]] seems still to be in rude health, as far as anyone can tell.
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| But many futurologists have in mind flying robo-taxis and hoverboards. What we have is Uber and electric scooters. You might say is no bad thing: [[thought leader]]s say, “yes, yes, yes: but the revolution is yet to happen, and happen it surely must.”<ref>See for example [https://www.allenovery.com/en-gb/global/news-and-insights/legal-innovation/the-future-of-the-in-house-legal-function this curious piece] from [[A&O]].</ref>
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| Yet, we have had all manner of changed circumstances thrown at us since the developed world lost its [[David Bowie|major stabilising influence]] in 2016: political insurrection. Disease. Dislocation. War. The Pentaverate. Prince died. All of these things, you would think, would accelerate the rate of change. But the only constant since then has been the ongoing good health of the traditional legal industry.
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| So what is going on? ''Où est la révolution''?
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| === No-one got fired for hiring Big Law === | | === No-one got fired for hiring Big Law === |