I attended the North Stafford Law Society Conference last week, they had two speakers Richard Susskind OBE and Andy Harris from Hazlewoods. Both speakers added great value to the evening. The event was a mixture of future lawyers (students) and partners from surrounding firms as well as myself and a few sponsors.
Andy Harris spoke about the LMS Financial Benchmarking Survey 2012 key findings, some results were a surprise to some people. In particular for a medium size firm (11-22 partners) the average fee earner needs to bring in £97,348 per annum to break even. But its not all doom and gloom profits are increasing for the third year running across all sizes of firms. Further details can be found here
The second speaker was Richard Susskind OBE, his talk was on Drivers of Change in the Legal Profession - The Future of Lawyers. Richard predicted back in 1996 that the majority of law firms will use email as their primary source to send documents within 10 years. You can imagine the laughs Richard got back then, well here we are and....Richard was right. Richard discussed the struggles law firms are faced with now and what they could be faced with in 5 years time. Some of the struggles firms are facing are:
- Outsourcing legal work outside the UK
- 40% of consumers will go to a high street firm over a solicitor
- More choice than ever, driving costs down
Technology was a key area, there are some great new areas breaking out that more and more law firms are adopting. Below are just a few examples
- Social Networks now over 300 to chose from
- 21st Century video conferencing, so good its as though they are in the room with you
- A.I (Artificial Intelligence)
- Sophisticated mobiles and tablet devices
So what is the future for lawyers and how does the next 5 years look?
- E.Learning / Online dispute resolution will increase
- Train lawyers for the 21st century not the 20th century
- Find new ways to deliver your service
- The consumer is changing, they will not work with "hand packaged services" it needs to be automated
- Anticipate where the market is going to be in 5 years, not where it is now
And so I leave you with Richard's final thought for the evening,
"The best way to predict the future, is to invent it"
Why not download my mindmap on Richard's talk