If one door closes ...

In his book ‘The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the nature of legal services’ Richard Susskind predicts that the current structure and method of working in legal firms cannot last, and that traditional legal practice is due for big changes over the next 20 years. 

A report in the Times today seems to indicate that this day is nearer than many people might have thought. The article claims that some 10,000 lawyers will lose their jobs in the next two years. For those remaining, things will never be the same again, with reports of equity parters losing their equity and being forced to take pay cuts, lawyers being offered ‘commission only deals’, and others only being hired if they can show a ‘dependable client following’. Difficult times indeed. 

My advice to those losing their jobs is to forget about going back into traditional practice, but to have a long think about how you can use your specialist knowledge in a more innovative way. For example there are many ways that one can start a new business reasonably easily using the internet, and with a large proportion of people on broadband nowadays, the internet is a good place to be. 

To use a couple of cliches, think of it as an opportunity rather than a threat. You may end up deciding that losing your job was the best thing that ever happened to you.

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Comments

[Andy Copperfield]

Hi Tessa,

It was good to find your blog.

It was Bob Dylan who sang about how 'The times they are a changing' and it being such a reality for solicitors has probably never been truer than now.

And whoever else it was who said that ' . . . the pages of history are turning faster than they can be read . . .' must also have sensed, as you do, that the rate of change in how we do things is going to leave many people falling way behind if they don't do something to try to come up to speed with the new ways of working.

Solicitors are not the only ones needing to be giving themselves a shake, in my view.

It seems that it's time to be abandoning the old paradigms that don't seem to be working any more in favour of something much more flexible and something even READY for change.

As well as the internet having had a gradual morphing effect on the way business has traditionally been done, I feel the credit crunch will, with hindsight, come to be seen as having been a relatively sudden, even violent, switch to a more dynamic model for the conduct of business.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

And on the subject that's close to your heart - Landlord Law - there'll likely be changes too.

And in an industry close to yours - BUYING property for owner occupation - people are coming up with 'creative' ways to buy property that were hardly ever heard of before the credit crunch.

Take the student sector of the private rental market for instance.

I've come across a Glasgow-based estate agent who seems to take the view that parents putting their own home up as collateral for a 100% mortgage for their student-child to BUY a property is going to be a part of the next wave of confidence about property. Check out their site and blogs at

http://www.propertyglasgow.biz/student_accommodation_glasgow/

http://www.propertyglasgow.biz/student_accommodation_glasgow/100%25_student_mortgages.htm

http://www.propertyglasgow.biz/home_report.htm

http://propertyglasgow.wordpress.com/

Finally, I think what you said at the end of your post about opportunity showing-up in the guise of change is so, so true.

I've just finished reading the book 'The Flipside - Finding the hidden opportunities in life' by Adam J Jackson. I think you would appreciate reading it - so look out for it. It's hot off the press, just having been published this year. It's prescribed reading for solicitors and everyone else feeling the need to search-out a new optimistic outlook at this time. So hope you like it.

And, hope you like this post. I'd welcome your thoughts on it.

Ancy C

[Wiltshire Solicitor]

I entirely agree with Tessa that the threats posed to the legal profession are a double-edged sword -- with as many opportunities as threats. The real problem however is not just the internet or Clementi, but the fact that most law firms are still not run like businesses. The age when having a practicing certificate and a brass name plaque were enough to guarantee a cozy retirement are long gone. To survive, any law firm, however strong a position they may appear be in now, need to behave like businesses, needs to develop the ability to respond quickly and flexibly to new threats and opportunities, wherever and whenever they may emerge.