the Zealous

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.”

Many lawyers, especially litigators, perceive qualities such as empathy, authenticity, and collaborative spirit that are essential for success in relationships and in most other professions to be liabilities in the practice of law. These lawyers may feel compelled to leave those qualities outside the office rather than harnessing the enormous positive energy that those qualities can provide to fuel their work. It’s no wonder that so many lawyers have low psychic energy and feel disconnected from their authentic selves in doing their jobs.

Of course the economic situation of the bar would be considerably improved if the number of lawyers could be reduced. There are too many lawyers today for the amount of legal business everywhere in America; and the normal result of excess of supply as compared to demand, has kept fees of lawyers low and elaborate living by lawyers rare.