Electronic Law Practice: An Exercise in Legal Futurology
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.00073 |
| Published date | 01 March 1997 |
| Date | 01 March 1997 |
Electronic Law Practice:
An Exercise in Legal Futurology
Robin Widdison*
Introduction
What will legal practice be like a quarter of a century from now? The summer of
1996 was notable for two important developments that have dared us not only to
ask this question, but also to start attempting to answer it. The first development is
the release of Lord Woolf’s ground-breaking Access to Justice: Final Report.
1
The
second is the publication of Richard Susskind’s fascinating new book The Future
of Law.
2
This article is intended as a piece of ‘legal futurology.’ Rather than
undertake a detailed review of these two works, it uses them as a platform to
launch an exploration of how information technology (IT) will change the way that
future lawyers practice law.
Over the last 25 years, the evolution of law practice has followed a relatively
orderly progression. While we can identify some significant changes, such as (i)
the rise of the big City law firms; (ii) the changing character of the Bar; (iii) a shift
in the relationship between the Bar and the solicitors’ profession; and (iv) a
transformation in the nature of vocational training, we can readily conclude that the
general character of law practice today is broadly similar to what it was a quarter of
a century ago.
The thesis presented here is that, over the next 25 years, legal practice will
change out of all recognition. Indeed, such change might be better thought of as
revolution rather than mere evolution – a shift in the legal paradigm as Susskind
calls it.
3
The principal agent for this change will be IT. The technology itself will
bring about direct changes in what lawyers do, how they do it, where they do it and
when they do it. IT will also play an important indirect role in hastening other
processes that are already underway, such as the rationalisation of the
administration of justice, the merger of the legal professions, and the reinvention
and harmonisation of the three stages of legal education – academic, vocational
and continuing.
Prediction is, of course, always a risky activity. Any attempt to peer into the
future and predict the impact of IT is especially hazardous. Since the advent of
personal computing in the mid-1970s, the rate of advance of computer technology
The Modern Law Review Limited 1997 (MLR 60:2, March). Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 143
*Director, Centre for Law and Computing, and Lecturer in Law, University of Durham.
1 Lord Woolf MR, Access to Justice: Final Report (London: HMSO, 1996).
2 Susskind, The Future of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
3ibid 285–292.
has been breathtakingly rapid. Today, a generation in technological terms is no
longer measured in decades or even years, but in months. For this reason, IT has
become one of the catalysts (perhaps, in the twenty-first century, the prime
catalyst) for social, economic and political change.
Despite the difficulty of predicting the impact of IT on the future – the outcome
of the ‘information revolution’ – wholesale popular realisation of the extraordinary
power and potential of the ‘Internet’ has made the task easier than it has been up
until now. The Internet is an electronic world that parallels our physical world. It
was born out of the fusion of an immense number of computer networks into one
overarching network of networks. Why has the emergence of the Internet and, in
particular, its publishing empire, the ‘World Wide Web,’ made prediction so much
easier? Because it would now seem that all the basic ingredients required for
dramatic and accelerating change are in place. Already today, we possess an
integrated, worldwide environment in which digitised information can be created,
stored, processed and communicated.
Underlying trends
In attempting to sketch the future of law practice, it is helpful to focus on some
underlying trends. Three such trends are not only influential today, but also
signpost the direction in which law practice will move over the next quarter of a
century. The three trends in question are dematerialisation, omnipresence and
malleability.
One use of the expression ‘dematerialisation’ describes the process by which
information can be seen to migrate from the physical world to the electronic world
(or ‘Cyberspace,’
4
as it is properly called). Information has in fact been travelling
in this direction for most of the postwar period. However, until the advent of
personal computing in the 1970s, the move was slow and piecemeal. Through the
1980s and 1990s, however, more and more information has either originated in
electronic form or been captured from paper. The increasing emphasis on the use
of the Internet as a prime medium for communication has rapidly accelerated this
process, bringing us ever closer to the critical mass that heralds the arrival of the
‘paperless office.’
Just as the informational contents of the workplace are increasingly likely to
exist in electronic rather than physical form, so too can we observe that workplaces
themselves are beginning to dematerialise. This process is not ultimately confined
to our workplaces, however. Before our eyes, other important institutions – banks,
building societies, shops, schools, colleges, libraries, court offices and
governmental institutions – all show early signs of migration into the electronic
environment. We are already beginning to conceive of these institutions more as
abstract, disembodied concepts than as concrete entities. Increasingly, we regard
our transactions with these institutions as based on electronic interaction rather
than face-to-face dealings that take place in a designated physical location.
The expression ‘omnipresence’ is intended to refer to a key result of the
dematerialisation of information and institutions important enough to be regarded
as a trend in its own right. The physical distance between documents, people and
places ceases to be a barrier. In terms of electronic ‘distance,’ information and
4 A term coined by William Gibson in his science fiction novel ‘Neuromancer’ (London: Grafton
Books, 1986).
The Modern Law Review [Vol. 60
144 The Modern Law Review Limited 1997
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