Change happens with law practices

The next 25 years will see more transformation than the last 25 By Gary Gosselin Dolan Media Newswires DETROIT, MI--To think, 25 years ago, Michigan Lawyers Weekly began publishing. Britain's first national color newspaper, Today, launched. Antonin Scalia was newly appointed to the Supreme Court. Gymnast Mary Lou Retton retired. Now, Lawyers Weekly is celebrating 25 years. Newspapers are mostly electronic. Scalia is the longest serving justice. And Mary Lou Retton has become a parody of herself, falling from a piñata in an insurance commercial. Who would have guessed? What milestones will the next 25 years bring? More automation, more specialization, more attention to customer service, and a possible shortage of lawyers? Great customer service is already becoming vital, and with the explosion of legal Internet sites and legal paperwork software, service becomes even more important, said Charles R. Toy, associate dean of career and professional development at The Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing. "In customer service, lawyers will have to be very focused in what their clients want," she said. "We're learning that client service really does matter, not, 'This is the way it is,' and, 'I can be gruff ...'" Cheap online resources will grow such that laypeople will tend to rely on those resources more and more, and use attorneys very selectively, Toy said. For example, they may bring in a lawyer to advise only about the child custody phase of a divorce. "I think the old model of lawyering is out of the price range of most working-class people," said Richard D. McLellan of McLellan Law Offices in Lansing. "That we will have to drive much smarter systems, easier forms, better dispute resolutions. So again, service will be key. "How are we going to deal with costs? That is by unbundling services," said Toy, who was 2009-10 president of the State Bar of Michigan. "People will hire attorneys for a very narrow reason, and once you [serve that purpose], the client can do other parts of the representation." Confronting 'unbundling' Greater specialization in discrete tasks of legal representation is already underway, and the ethical boundaries of "unbundling" are being articulated in informal and formal opinions, including in Michigan, said Janet Welch, executive director of the State Bar of Michigan. "As long as we can find a way to 'red flag' for clients the circumstances under which they should be aware of the need for legal representation," she said. "In many ways 'unbundling' has been an accepted way of doing business in transactional law practice for decades." The Internet has crept into the profession and has changed the way attorneys interact with clients and will continue to do so, Welch said. "Historically," she explained, "the public has tended to think of attorneys as people who have gone to law school to learn a body of knowledge called 'the law,' a discrete body of knowledge that allows attorneys to say, 'This is legal, and that is illegal,' 'Do this, don't do that.' "Now that statutes and even case law are accessible online, people who can read and use a search engine think they can know what lawyers know. As a profession, we've not done a good job of explaining that legal training is not just knowing statutes and case law and common law; it's about knowing what law is applicable to a particular set of facts and what to do about it. Conveying that understanding of what we do is going to be a big part of our challenge in the years ahead." A big change and opportunity will be in the health care area with the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (universal health care), McLellan said. "With Obamacare, can you imagine the lawyering-up people will do when they hear they can't get this [treatment] or can't get that [treatment], and it imposes IRS-type regulations for certain types of care?" McLellan said. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. "Can you imagine the number of lawyers that will be needed to write the rules in health care?" he added. "Get a law degree and somehow be attached to the health care industry." There will be jobs drafting rules, interpreting them for the government, institutions and individuals, McLellan said, noting it will be a growth industry for lawyers. "Anytime you transfer billions of dollars and from one to another, the lawyers are the ones that grease the change -- or hold up the change." Boomers adding boom The practice of law will become broader, Welch said, but don't look for sweatshop legal advice operations in places like Bangalore, India. "Will lawyers be licensed not only in more than one state, but across national lines? I think the answer is almost certainly yes, as business becomes more and more global and legal transactions and even family transactions increasingly cross national boundaries," Welch said. "Some discrete tasks that require legal training, like legal research and document preparation, are already being outsourced across national boundaries. "But, in general, I don't see legal 'advice' about the law of a particular jurisdiction becoming unhinged from the geography of the jurisdiction itself and becoming open to the lowest legal bidder internationally," she added. "Lawyers will still be experts in the law of particular jurisdiction or jurisdictions. The basic question of how we decide which law applies to a particular set of facts, 'the question of jurisdiction,' I don't see that changing dramatically. That's a question of power and politics." As the baby boomers begin to retire en masse, the effects will be twofold. First, there will be increased need for lawyers in estate planning, Social Security and elder law. Second, there will be the baby boomer lawyers who will be leaving practice in large numbers, too, which will have a big impact. "Yes, and this, too, has already started," Welch said. "An equally important effect on the profession is the departure from the scene of the boomer lawyers. Many pundits think that the passing of the boomers will not only correct the present market oversupply of lawyers, but will cause a lawyer shortage." In the future, it appears the Cyber Court, which was first signed into law in 2002 but never got off the ground, may have gotten new life with the passage of 10 years, and continued calls for streamlining the court system. He noted that the program simply fizzled at the time, but said that Chief Justice Robert P. Young Jr. now has talked to Gov. Rick Snyder coming off the heels of the State Bar's Judicial Crossroads Task Force report, which calls for reduced judgeships and streamlining of the system. He said the State Bar also has drafted court rules for the process, so Cyber Courts may become a reality before the next 25 years ends, McLellan said. Entire contents copyrighted © 2011 by Dolan Media Company Published: Mon, Nov 7, 2011

––––––––––––––––––––
 Subscribe to the Legal News!
 http://legalnews.com/Home/Subscription
Full access to public notices, articles, columns, archives, statistics, calendar and more
Day Pass Only $4.95!
One-County $80/year
Three-County & Full Pass also available