the Zealous

It is the rare lawyer that takes a keen interest in a topic to the point of research and publication. Even rarer is the lawyer who courts criticism and reaction. By teaching, and accepting challenge, such a lawyer becomes an arena lawyer, willing to put herself out there.

The arena lawyer becomes an expert, and in doing so, adds to the collective knowledge of our trade.

And experts—even lawyers—are experts first, and competitors second. Law firms large and small go to great lengths to source original content, as a means of demonstrating expertise. This expertise can be easily appropriated by the competition, and yet the freely shared legal content flow never ceases.

The word itself derives from Old French, and in turn from Latin, where it means something like “shield-holder.” In the 1200s and 1300s in England, a variety of languages were used, so such figures might be referred to as the … French escuier, which became “esquire.” These terms all refer to roughly similar people. This role was generally considered moderately prestigious for young men of some wealth, but at its core it was a service job. You carry a knight’s stuff, tend to his horses, that kind of thing. “Esquire” and “squire” were names for the same gig for a few hundred years.

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. 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 ....” Above all, lawyers should not “feel exempt from assessing whether at least some of their current workload might be undertaken differently in years to come. And no lawyers should shirk from the challenge of identifying their distinctive capabilities.”