How do You See Legal Business in Three, Five, or Ten Years?

Available in original language. Adapted from publication by “Ukrainskiy Yuryst”.

People think and plan their future linearly. And yet, the world is developing nonlinearly. So, while we’re planning to commoditize legal services, develop agreement builders, and provide services using the artificial intelligence with neural networks, legal services may actually disappear. What if the next amendments to the Tax Code will be published as add-ons to 1C, SAP, or Oracle? Alas, this is already boring, and plain as a pikestaff.

What’s really interesting is that the barrier for going into any business is being reduced to almost a zero value. Your genius and a little bit of luck are well enough for you to develop a searching algorithm and compete with Google. The same goes for legal industry: the threshold for setting up a new company is almost equal to zero. A couple of month ago, Ernst & Young announced that they would no longer check whether their prospective employees had any university degrees. Of course, for now, it’s only a marketing move. But if we dig deeper, a university degree is no longer appreciated in the same way as it was 30, or even 10 years ago. Who would you hire right now: a grad with zero experience, or a 3^rd year student with a “Top Rated” status on Upwork? And what about a freshie who’s able to draw up a smart contract on Etherium?

Now think of whether the mission and values of an average law firm would attract the freshies who can draw up smart contacts and deliver services on Upwork? Apparently, the labour standards have changed. A decade earlier, Google managed to create their blue ocean right next to the red ocean of Microsoft. Technologies were not the only key to their success. Google invented its own approach to engineering staff management. The idea was simple: all they had to do is hire geniuses, and those geniuses worked to create genius products. I think that at the next stage of staff management evolution, the question will come up how to organize the work of engineers who are able to incorporate companies and don’t need anybody’s assistance for this – the lawyers.