LA Ute
03-16-2013, 04:20 PM
This is from a piece by Ben Barton, A Glass Half Full Look at the Changes in the American Legal Market: (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2054857)
The obvious reason for optimism is that America will be significantly better off if we spend less on legal services. . . . Legal services will be cheaper, more accessible AND better. These changes are bad for lawyers in the same way digital photography was bad for Kodak. Nevertheless, it is outstanding news for the country as a whole. Less obviously, the trends identified in Larry Ribstein’s ‘Death of Big Law’ and the ripple effect through law schools will, ironically, lead us to a leaner, happier profession. For years the hope of securing a job in Big Law, the easy availability of student loans, and the misperception of what lawyers do and what law school is like have drawn many ill-suited individuals into law. This has had a number of deleterious effects on those individuals and on the practice as a whole. Current market forces and news coverage, however, will eventually result in a profession staffed by individuals who chose law despite a substantial headwind, rather than because they did not know what else to do and they thought it would guarantee a high salary for life.
This is just from the abstract, but it seems to make a lot of sense.
The obvious reason for optimism is that America will be significantly better off if we spend less on legal services. . . . Legal services will be cheaper, more accessible AND better. These changes are bad for lawyers in the same way digital photography was bad for Kodak. Nevertheless, it is outstanding news for the country as a whole. Less obviously, the trends identified in Larry Ribstein’s ‘Death of Big Law’ and the ripple effect through law schools will, ironically, lead us to a leaner, happier profession. For years the hope of securing a job in Big Law, the easy availability of student loans, and the misperception of what lawyers do and what law school is like have drawn many ill-suited individuals into law. This has had a number of deleterious effects on those individuals and on the practice as a whole. Current market forces and news coverage, however, will eventually result in a profession staffed by individuals who chose law despite a substantial headwind, rather than because they did not know what else to do and they thought it would guarantee a high salary for life.
This is just from the abstract, but it seems to make a lot of sense.