Platform economies challenge many legal paradigms – and consequently the whole legal profession. First I would like to describe how platform economy differs from a traditional value chain based pipeline industry where most lawyers have got their experience from. In the end of this article I list the many areas of law that are undergoing a transformation and put judgement skills of lawyers to the test.
The ushering in of the fourth industrial revolution fundamentally has two dimensions, or perhaps rather two poles on a spectrum; the strategic and the tactical. The contours and the undercurrents of the strategic vector have been well profiled in the summary report of the survey of the 60 General Councils in this report. My own research and work is focusing more on the impact of the IT revolution on the everyday work (i.e. the tactical dimension) of lawyers. While lawyers always have been an elite profession when it comes to performance – putting in those long yet highly qualitative hours – the conditions for the work itself has been radically transformed in the last decade.
There’s a lot of talk these days about disruption of industries and how AI and robots will make pretty much everyone unemployed by the end of the week. The legal industry has realized that it too is exposed.
This makes a lot of sense if you think about some of the more unexciting tasks of a law firm associate, legal researcher or court clerk. Collecting, searching through, producing and to some extent even analyzing written information is something that a computer can do much more efficiently than any straight A law graduate and legal professionals shouldn’t even try to compete with this development.