The legal scene
This chapter examines the key issues facing the UK legal profession in 2019-20 of which future lawyers should be aware, as well as the cases and mergers that have made the headlines. “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change,” a clear- sighted aristocrat observes in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard , in what is a simple summation of a vastly complex issue that seems apt for today’s legal profession. In dozens of distinct specialisms, lawyers interact with companies, national and local government, institutions and individuals in almost every area of life, so it is no surprise that wider economic and political issues affecting their clients often have a knock- on impact on their work (find out more in “Solicitors’ practice areas” and “Barristers’ practice areas”). Of these, five key issues are pressurising the whole sector and driving profession-wide change in various ways. They can be divided into: • external factors – technology, the near- collapse of legal aid and Brexit; and • internal issues – equality and diversity in the profession, and changes to the way solicitors and barristers are trained. Tech and innovation In his influential book Tomorrow’s Lawyers and The Future of the Profession s, leading legal thinker Richard Susskind observes how during the “technological revolution” that swept the manufacturing industry over 20 years ago, manufacturers turned to external providers to assemble products and parts at a lower cost using technology. As advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation create revolutionary new possibilities (and challenges) for the legal profession, this trend has repeated itself. Many firms have outsourced document review and legal research tasks, plus non fee-earning parts of the business such as HR and recruitment. Firms feel pressure to cut costs as clients demand ever
more competitive fees and added value, which has also resulted in the widespread practice of employing paralegals on fixed-term contracts instead of more expensive solicitors. The real challenge for lawyers is to develop new, tech-based ways of delivering legal services as technology drives new ways of doing the same tasks. Solicitors, barristers and legal executives will still be needed, but clients in pursuit of cheaper, faster services are likely to sacrifice the human touch altogether for many basic legal functions in favour of an automated offering. The demand for change from the public is certainly there – in a survey by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) released in June 2019, 58% of respondents felt that the legal system is “not set up for ordinary people.” The biggest barrier to accessing legal advice was costs, with 68% saying that they would not be able to access help because they can’t afford it. The SRA has pointed to the cheaper services enabled by technology as a way of mitigating the widespread lack of access to legal advice. The role of trainee solicitors is already being adapted to embrace technology. Junior solicitors and trainees have traditionally drafted simple contracts and reviewed documents, but this type of work is becoming increasingly automated. Now, trainees are more likely to manage the process of referring the initial document review to a third party that does the work at a lower cost, undertaking a secondary review of the document later. Management skills and an understanding of technology – and how to resolve technical problems – are increasingly important skills. Access to justice This year the United Nations (UN) sent its special rapporteur on poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, on a fact-finding tour of the UK. His final report was an excoriating critique of the austerity policies pursued by successive governments over the past nine
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