Speakers at Avvo’s sixth annual Lawyernomics conference discussed how the legal profession will function in the next five to ten years. Avvo CEO Mark Britton noted that lawyers are leaving opportunities on the table by not addressing commoditized work. Attorneys aren’t providing certain services to their clients yet look negatively upon nonlawyers who try to do it themselves. Automating work through “freemium” models such as Rocket Matter can help attorneys create strong relationships with potential and current clients while allowing lawyers to avoid the work they don’t want to do, according to Britton.

F. Daniel Siciliano, a professor at Stanford Law School, asserted that, as law becomes readily available to the public and more open-sourced, clients will no longer need lawyers. He had done research that ultimately indicated that, when a targeted immigration law office relied less on human employees and more on technology, it was 10 times more profitable than offices with traditional revenue models. According to Dave Schappell, startup business development manager at Amazon Web Services, a lawyers should be investing in is the Cloud, an option that has been ignored by many attorneys. Plenty of major companies and government agencies already run on the Cloud, increasing agility and encouraging innovation by lowering risk, Schappell says. While the legal profession may be going through chaotic changes, it is important that they create a strong culture of client service and remain true to their values.

Article via ABA Journal, 18 May 2015

Photo: Law Books via Mr.TinDC [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]