the Zealous

28 Mar 19


Richard Susskind is “an author, speaker, and independent adviser to major professional firms and to national governments. His main area of expertise is the future of professional service and, in particular, the way in which the IT and the Internet are changing the work of lawyers.” In the words of Jordan Furlong: “We talk a lot about ‘visionaries’ these days, but in the legal profession, nobody seriously competes with Richard Susskind for that title ….”.

In 2009, Susskind published The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services, a pioneering work that served as a wake-up call for the legal profession. Lawyers are not “entitled to profit from the law”, Susskind wrote with a poignancy that continues to reverberate to this day. Susskind’s was one of the first voices to challenge lawyers to “identify their distinctive skills and talents, the capabilities that they possess that cannot, crudely, be replaced by advanced systems, or by less costly workers supported by technology or standard processes, or by lay-people armed with online self-help tools.”

20 Feb 19

I can't keep up with what's been going down
I think my heart must just be slowing down
Among the human beings
In their designer jeans
Am I the only one who hears the screams
And the strangled cries of lawyers in love

God sends his spaceships to America the beautiful
They land at six o'clock and there we are, the dutiful
Eating from TV trays
Tuned into Happy Days
Waiting for World War III while Jesus slaves
To the mating calls of lawyers in love
 

Last night I watched the news from Washington, the capital
The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them, like Russians will
Now we've got all this room
We've even got the moon
And I hear the USSR will be open soon
As vacation land for lawyers in love
 

Jackson Browne, Lawyers in Love (1983)

31 Jan 19

Alex Batesmith and Jake Stevens, in a compelling piece of scholarship, In the Absence of the Rule of Law: Everyday Lawyering, Dignity and Resistance in Myanmar’s ‘Disciplined Democracy’, Social & Legal Studies (2018), remind us how fortunate we are to be practicing law in a society that upholds the rule of law (citations omitted; emphasis added):