Ride the Lightning

UK Lawyers vs. US lawyers … Lawyers vs Other Professionals

February 16, 2016

I am delighted to present this guest post from Richard Susskind. Be on the lookout for our review of Richard and Daniel's marvelous new book from Attorney at Work tomorrow. You can purchase the book here. Highly recommended for all professionals.

Sunday 14^th February 2016. I am comfortably installed in an Airbus 380, winging my way from London to Washington. The Atlantic Ocean lies 35,000 feet below. My agreeable travel companion is my son and co-author, Daniel, an Oxford economist. We are bound for Harvard where we are to give a lecture on our new work, The Future of the Professions (Oxford University Press). After this, we are off to New York, where the international law firm, White & Case, is generously hosting a reception to celebrate the launch of the book in the US.

Given the nature of the trip, I have been reflecting on two questions. The first is whether the UK legal community is more or less advanced in its use of technology than its counterpart in the US. I am often asked about this and am unable to give the kind of snappy answer that is invariably wanted. The simplest response I can give is this: the top UK law firms are more advanced in their use of technology than the equivalent US practices; there are a dozen or so US law schools that are much more technologically progressive than any UK law faculties; in-house counsel in the UK seem to be more technologically demanding of their advisers than in the US; and the US undoubtedly has a richer and larger community of legal tech start-ups than can be found in the UK.

The second question goes to the heart of our book, and it is whether lawyers are more or less resistant than other professionals in their uptake of new technology. Lawyers themselves often claim, with inexplicable satisfaction, that they are more conservative than any other occupational grouping. Whether lawyers become conservative through training and daily practice or whether conservative people are attracted to legal work is not clear. What is even less clear is their basic assumption. In researching for our book, we interviewed a wide range of professionals in the US and UK – doctors, teachers, tax advisers, auditors, consultants, members of the clergy, architects, journalists, as well as lawyers. And it turns out that … they are all conservative. Lawyers are not special.

In medicine, for example, it is said that it takes around 18 years for a demonstrably beneficial innovation (for example, the stethoscope) to be widely embraced. In The Checklist Manifesto, the surgeon Atul Gawande describes how strongly his profession resisted the adoption of a simple surgical checklist that unarguably reduced the number of errors in operating theatres.

It emerges, from our research at least, that there is complex institutional drag at play here. The professions are complex monopolies that suffer from great inertia. The pervasive conservatism is not simply a psychological phenomenon. It is economic and cultural too. As a result, in the long run, fundamental transformation is likely to come from beyond the professions – from agile start-ups and high-tech disruptors that have no legacy to lose and every incentive to innovate. Today's market leaders should be wary. The competition that kills them will not look like them.

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