This cartoon was stimulated by the opening of last week's Legal Futures weekly newsletter where Neil Rose said:
Does the changing legal market make it a good time for students eyeing up a career in the law? Or should they be wary of the old joke that the future of the law firm consists of a computer, a dog and a lawyer - the computer to do the legal work, the dog to keep the lawyer away from the computer and the lawyer to feed the dog?
This (without the joke) is the essence of Professor Richard Susskind's new book aimed at 'tomorrow's lawyers', which lays out and updates his well-known predictions for the legal world and looks at where the lawyers of the future will fit into it. In one interesting passage, he explains how high street law firms have little future beyond 2020 because of competition from banks and retailers, but medium-sized practices have a "window of opportunity".