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Book Review
Richard Susskind, Transforming the Law: Essays on Technology, Justice and the
Legal Marketplace. Oxford University Press, 2000. 292 pp. ISBN 0-19-829922-2
1. Introduction
As the author puts it in the opening sentence, “[t]his book is something of a mixed
bag”. Only the first two chapters – Part I – are genuinely new, covering just 76
pages, and they are the main focus of this review. Part II contains four chapters
drawn from or related to Susskind’s earlier book, The Future of Law (1996). Part
III reaches even further back and republishes four pieces from his work on legal
expert systems in the 1980s. And Part IV, dedicated to the broader role of IT in the
justice system, also contains revisions of essays written for other occasions.
Readers of this journal (the intended audience for my review) will likely be
familiar with some of these writings, which have been frequently referenced in
the AI and law literature. It’s useful to have them compiled in an updated and
easily accessible collection. And the presence in one place of Susskind’s broadranging
explorations of technical possibilities, philosophical underpinnings, and
business realities is a valuable testament to the rich multidisciplinarity needed
in approaching any of these subjects. But to my mind the primary value of this
book is its introduction of a framework of ideas that clarify the commercial and
civic relevance – indeed the strategic centrality – of the knowledge technologies on
which we in legal AI labor.
Transforming the Law is an elegantly written book. It has a clear, engaging,
pleasant style. It’s full of interesting information and ideas. Some points may be
old and some may be obvious, but they are organized in a vibrant, coherent whole.
Contrary to many reading experiences these days – especially in technology contexts,
it is free of typos and glaring word usage errors. Oxford University Press has
admirably high production standards. (The only apparent error I noticed was the
misplacement of some material in Figure 1.11.)
Three themes undergird this book: (1) that the Internet and other information
technologies will “fundamentally, irreversibly, and comprehensively change legal
practice, the administration of justice, and the way in which non-lawyers handle
their legal and quasi-legal affairs”; (2) that through those technologies people “will
be able to identify and understand their legal rights and duties far more easily than
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has ever been possible in the past” and access “speedier, cheaper, and less combative
mechanisms for resolving disputes”; and (3) that IT can and will increasingly
be used to “capture, preserve, and disseminate legal knowledge and expertise” in
support of such better access.
Richard Susskind is one of very few voices recognized internationally on the
subject of IT-oriented reconceptualization of legal services. Few authors of comparable
stature have given book-length treatment of these ideas. Ethan Katsh has
written two books of equivalent scope (1989, 1995), which are more scholarly
and intellectually adventurous, but less fitted for mainstream legal and business
professionals. David Maister articulates many similar insights about the strategic
importance of knowledge systems in professional services organizations (1997),
but is less conversant with specific technologies or peculiarities of the legal domain.
Others have championed similar ideas in short articles. See, e.g., Granat (1997),
Hokkanen (1999) and Lauritsen (1990, 2001).
Let’s look more specifically at chapters 1 and 2, each of which revolves around
a unifying model.
2. The grid
I once heard a reasonably famous business speaker say “it’s the job of us consultants
to simplify the world into two-by-two matrices”. Susskind has found such a
matrix, and it’s a fertile one.
The basic idea is to plot a vertical internal-external axis against a horizontal
technology-information-knowledge axis. The resulting quadrants then define four
general categories into which law-related IT applications might fall. Here’s a rough
reconstruction.
External
Technology Infor- mation Knowledge
Internal
The up/down dimension is clear enough. Things on the upper part of the grid
relate to a firm’s external activities, its relations with clients (and presumably other
outside actors, like suppliers, partners, the public, etc.) Things on the bottom part
are internal to the firm.
The left/right dimension represents a spectrum of processing sophistication,
from “bare” technology handling simple data, through more generic information
processing, and on into manipulation of advanced knowledge representations.
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In the bottom left quadrant would be found the basic hardware, software, and
networking infrastructures, along with such applications as timekeeping and accounting
systems, document management, and litigation support – namely those
“back office” technologies supportive of law office operations, but not generally
visible to clients or the public, and also not particularly high in programmed
knowledge content. These are the foundational technologies no firm can afford
to neglect.
Bottom right technologies include many described today under the rubric of
“knowledge management”, such as know-how databases, precedent repositories,
intelligent checklists, document assembly, and expert systems. These might be
deployed on an intranet. Knowledge content is high, but these systems are still
internally oriented, largely used by attorneys and other professionals within the
virtual walls of the practice organization. Bottom-right systems promote internal
efficiency and leverage human and other knowledge resources.
The top left quarter contains outwardly focused, operations-oriented applications,
like e-mail links with clients, “deal rooms”, and client-accessible matter
management systems. Some law firm extranets have this character. You can think
of these technologies as better ways of doing traditional legal services.
The top right, finally, maps technologies that are high in both outwardorientation
and knowledge content. These include online advice systems, self-help
document assembly solutions, compliance audits, and computer-based training for
clients. You can think of this area as the intersection of electronic commerce and
knowledge management. Needless to say, this is where many of us with experiences
both in legal AI and dot-com entrepreneurship feel the action is. This is the world
of online legal services, “virtual lawyers”, sexy new business opportunities, and
radically new models for service delivery.
I suspect that most readers just being exposed to this framework will find it
conceptually unsatisfying, especially in the crude form I’ve provided. There are a
few immediate concerns. Technology, for instance, is pervasive in all four quadrants,
so it seems a bit odd to have it labeled as the end of one of the axes. And
the left/right distinction is somewhat ambiguous. In Susskind’s discussion of the
top half of the grid it seems to signify the distinction between traditional or conventional
legal services, and new, innovative approaches. On the bottom half, the
left/right distinction variously stands for back office vs. front office, foundation vs.
superstructure, lesser vs. greater sophistication, and generic vs. domain-specific
applications. These are all to be sure related, but represent modes of differentiation
whose nuances are lost when mixed.
It occurs to me that one characterization of the left-right dimension not explicitly
discussed or rejected by Susskind would be that of conduit versus content.
The far left side represents pure ‘plumbing’, with little regard to what is flowing in
the pipes, and the far right represents the knowledge ‘stuff’ that both lawyers and
clients need, caring little about just how it is bottled and transported.
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Susskind graciously acknowledges and addresses some of the shortcomings of
his Grid, and makes a convincing case that its simplifications achieve the pragmatic
purpose of providing a tool with which lawyers, technologists, and business analysts
can communicate important ideas. Not only does it offer an easily understood
framework onto which various technologies and initiatives can be meaningfully organized,
it serves as a theater within which some major business strategy scenarios
for a legal services provider can be rehearsed.
The second half of Chapter 1 uses the Grid to explore and compare eight specific
strategic alternatives in terms of which quadrant or quadrants are emphasized. For
instance, “putting the house in order” is a strategic scenario of a firm that limits
attention to the bottom two quadrants, and rejects electronic commerce, at least for
the short-term.
Just as “above the fold” is where a day’s most important stories appear on the
front page of a newspaper, “above the line” is where law firms are advised to pay
special attention. Yet Susskind estimates that contemporary law firm IT budgets
allocate a mere five percent to that territory. Similarly, most of the below-theline
activity is on the left, in the back-office, infrastructural arena. But Susskind
also reports dramatic progress outward from the bottom-left to the other quadrants
between 1995 and 1999, at least among major law firms.
Not surprisingly, the only strategy Susskind enthusiastically endorses for a law
firm “that wishes to enjoy commercial success in the new economy” is one of
full commitment to all four corners of the grid. (“[L]aw firms should be fully
committed across all four quadrants by 2005.”) Top-notch back-office and client
relationship systems will be expected as a matter of course, good internal knowledge
management will increasingly be required, and competitive advantage will
mainly be achieved by aggressive activity in the top-right. It is also here that the
transformation referenced in the book’s title occurs.
The Legal Grid is interestingly reminiscent of a slightly more famous 2 × 2
matrix, the one laid out in Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective
People, which plots the dimensions of important/not-important and urgent/noturgent
against each other. It turns out that the top right quarter of Covey’s grid
(“Quadrant 2”) is especially notable as well, for it signifies things that are important
but not urgent, and that thus tend to be postponed and neglected. That well
describes the state of web services and other Susskind-Quadrant-2 initiatives at
most law firms today. You might say that they are experiencing grid lock. But the
critical mass of firms in London, New York, Sydney, and elsewhere that are now
taking the online services challenge seriously not to mention the “Big Five” (global
accounting/consulting firms like Pricewaterhouse Coopers) and other nimble new
competitors – will heighten the urgency of such activity across the profession.
One last overlay of The Grid that confirms its versatility is that of human resources:
namely, what kinds of people are needed to lead work across different
swaths of the legal technology landscape? Susskind persuasively allocates the roles
of Chief Technology Officer, Chief Information Officer, and Chief Knowledge Of-
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ficer to three vertical slices of the grid, ordered left to right respectively. Few firms
will in fact have a CTO, a CIO, and a CKO, but most will need to understand those
positions as distinct roles that call upon different skill sets and respond to different
aspects of their overall strategy.
3. The chain
Chapter 2 introduces a second model for thinking about how information technology
will catalyze transformations in the legal system, that of the “client service
chain”. This is basically a view of the legal services process as comprised of three
phases: recognition, selection, and service. Today’s service chain typically consists
of (1) some “blatant trigger” – an event or circumstance that unambiguously calls
for legal attention – causing a person to recognize the need for professional help;
(2) selection of a lawyer through a variety of conventional channels (prior familiarity,
family relation or friendship, local presence, advertising, reputation, etc.); and
(3) service delivery in the form of traditional one-to-one counsel, guidance, and
matter management.
The paradigm today is one of reactive, not proactive measures. It encapsulates
a lawyer-centric, case by case, face-to-face model of how people get their legal
needs met. But each aspect of the contemporary service chain is open to creative
deconstruction at the hands of new technologies and business models. Classical
intermediaries like lawyers are particularly vulnerable to disintermediation and
reintermediation.
In the recognition part of the chain, today’s blatant-trigger, reactive model is
likely to be displaced, or at least complemented, by proactive facilities that draw
upon IT to give early warnings and help prevent legal mishaps. These include legal
audits, push technologies (automatically alerting people based on their stored pro-
files, rather than requiring them to seek and “pull” relevant information), intelligent
agents (which can serve both to recognize problems and suggest solutions), and
arrangements that embed legal expertise right within clients’ operational business
systems. Susskind’s vivid point on this front is that “clients would like a fence at
the top of the cliff rather than an ambulance at the bottom”.
In the selection phase, today’s confusing, choice-limited, information-poor processes
for finding an appropriate service provider are being supplemented with
online auctions, new “infomediaries” that match clients and lawyers, and virtual
teams of professionals who assemble dynamically in response to particular con-
figurations of need. The selection step will also increasingly result in the purchase
of “unbundled” services, where tasks are allocated among the client, information
systems, and zero or more lawyers as needed and desired.
In the service-delivery (or, perhaps better understood, service-receiving) stage,
today’s conventional direct-consultation lawyering model will give way to multiprovider,
unbundled, machine-based, and other creative ways to address the underlying
legal need. Online legal services in particular will commoditize many
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routine services, providing increased consumer choice, lower prices, and perhaps
even higher quality. This may not bode well for lawyers not adept at change. But
as Susskind notes, “the law and legal institutions are no more there to provide a
livelihood for lawyers than ill-health exists to provide a living for doctors”.
The linear service chain of today effectively becomes a web of routes through
which people discover and deal with their legal needs.
Just like his Grid, Susskind’s Client Service Chain is open to various forms
of conceptual challenge. Elsewhere in contemporary business literature “service
chain” is often used in analogy to “supply chain” or “demand chain”, that is,
as sequences of steps in which different participants add value in a process. A
richer model of the legal service chain would encompass contributions to the legal
value package from law schools (“suppliers” of lawyers), law publishers, and legal
software and other tool providers. But again the admitted simplifications of this
model yield a valuable prism through which to explore important policies and
opportunities.
The latter part of Chapter 2 includes discussion of the “disruptive technologies”
concept popularized by Clayton Christensen in The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997).
Susskind gives a compelling portrayal of the deep conflict many law firms will find
themselves in as they try to balance resources between technologies that sustain
their current, profitable business models, and disruptive ones like online legal services
that appear to threaten those models, but which may turn out to be essential
for long term survival. This dilemma will be sharpened by the huge accounting and
consulting firms, which have begun aggressively to attack the legal marketplace,
and which are not burdened with cultural and structural commitments to traditional
legal service models. The chapter appropriately concludes with six broad strategies
for legal businesses to follow, such as establishing an off-site “new economy unit”
and setting up online resources for every matter that serve the differing needs of
the client, the in-house team, the other parties, and perhaps even the public.
4. Legal futures
Part II of this book re-presents many of the provocative ideas first put forth in
Susskind’s 1996 The Future of Law. Those who haven’t read that book, or its 1998
revised edition in paperback, will find the four chapters here a handy alternative.
They lay out a comprehensive vision of how today’s “legal paradigm” of service
and process will morph into tomorrow’s. For instance, we will move from advisory,
one-to-one services to informational, one-to-many services. We will migrate from
legal problem solving to legal risk management, from dispute resolution to dispute
pre-emption, from a dedicated, single legal profession to largely distinct callings
of advocate/advisors and legal knowledge engineers.
Another important theme from this earlier work is the “latent legal market” –
that broad world of situations in the everyday lives of people and businesses that
would benefit from legal guidance, but have not so benefited because available
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services are too expensive, cumbersome, time consuming, or otherwise forbidding.
The availability of simple, cheap online legal services could liberate a lot of this
kind of demand.
Again, Susskind does a good job of weaving available (or imaginable) technologies
into these business contexts and opportunities, and his analyses hold up quite
well against the intervening years. Chapter 5 on “The Likely and the Possible”,
drawn from the 1998 paperback edition, and Chapter 6 (“A Response to Critics”)
from 1999 provide a nice bridge between the 1996 book and the newest parts of the
current one. I’m particularly gratified that Susskind stops frequently to emphasize
the untenable inadequacy of legal services in modern societies for the poor and
disadvantaged, and the ways in which that problem can begin to be addressed by
the technical and business innovations chronicled here.
5. Expert and justice systems
Part III is an updated and annotated collection of Susskind’s work on expert
systems in the 1980s. I won’t try to summarize those chapters here, but would
encourage AI and law researchers to devote some time to them, both for their
original value and for Susskind’s (and your own) reflections on this work from
a post-Web, fifteen-years-hindsight point of view. His general perspective seems
to be that most of the issues and insights he framed in those early days remain
relevant and fundamentally unchanged by intervening events.
Part IV likewise won’t be addressed in this review, which is getting too long, but
it usefully covers important issues in the broader civil justice system, based on work
in England and Wales. Chapter 12 – “The Electronic Pillars of Justice” – lays out
a strategic model for national governments to follow in managing and reforming
their justice systems, along with a case study based on work done in the jurisdiction
of Jersey. The book closes with a reprint of Susskind’s 1986 Modern Law Review
article, “The Computer Judge”, which is valuable both as another piece of frozen
history and for reminding us of some of the jurisprudential issues that used to take
a larger part in AI and law conversations.
6. Some quibbles
By the time my review sees print, this book will have been out for nearly two years.
The cutting edge flavor of some parts will understandably be blunted. Even now
the book has a distinct pre-dotcom-bubble-burst flavor, with some phrases (like
“new economy”) that have a different ring these days. How much of Susskind’s
optimism requires reexamination in light of the 2000–2001 economic slowdown?
What impact will the events of September 11, 2001 (which are just weeks behind
me at this writing) have on the direction and pace of law’s transformation?
USlaw, AmeriCounsel, LegalOpinion.com, and Flywheel Communications are
just four major startups in the United States that sought to ride on some of the
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dynamics Susskind chronicles, but have foundered. Online legal services pioneer
Epoch Software in the United Kingdom went into voluntary liquidation, was reorganized
as part of a management buy-out, and now operates as LawAssure in the
UK and MyLawyer.com in the US. Times are tough and law’s “transformers” seem
to be running at a lower current. A world in which the Internet mania has faded,
and in which globalization and modernization are slowed by terrorism and political
unrest, may warrant very different business strategies than the world of early 2000.
These developments subsequent to publication can hardly be raised by way of
critique. For true criticisms, only two come to mind:
1. There are frequent references to “non-lawyers”. While this usage is hardly
limited to Susskind, it began to grate on me in this book. I find that you can
usually substitute “people” for this phrase without sacrificing meaning. (Do we
talk about “non-doctors” in health care policy debates?)
2. Susskind long ago ceased to be a visible presence in the AI and law research
world, and does not reveal much familiarity with the wide current of work
that has flowed since the early days when he was an active player. Case-based
reasoning, for instance, is not directly touched on. But while it is regrettable
that he has not remained a more active participant in the events and publications
of the international AI and law community, Susskind has done quite a service
to that community by his books. We should redouble our efforts to entice him
back.
7. Taking action
Susskind delivers a set of messages that will encourage some firms to act. If enough
were to follow his recommendation that they create distinct “new economy units”
dedicated to technology-based transformations of the business of law, that would
be like a full-employment act for AI and law specialists. We legal AI researchers
and developers should also act on the opportunities his latest book so clearly lays
out.
Those of us who have gone to battle in the right-side quadrants know the
stunning difficulty of sophisticated legal knowledge engineering, and of exploiting
these ideas commercially. Can we live up to the visions Susskind lays out for the
legal world?
If you are an AI and law type and haven’t already read this book, you should.
For a cogent admixture of insightful business analysis and technology reporting,
this is about as good as it gets. People dedicated to understanding the challenges
and potentials of knowledge engineering in the world of law should appreciate the
business ideas and realities that structure that world. If you work in a law firm,
see if you can get a dialog going with firm leaders around these ideas. Organize a
reading club to work through them together. There are lots of real-world examples
and other specifics in this book.
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If you’re a lawyer or law firm administrator, the first several chapters are just
about essential reading. Even if you ultimately reject some of the ideas contained
there, you need to understand them. Your best competition does.
References
Granat, R. (1997). From Legal Services to Information Services. Internet Practice Newsletter, May,
1997. (Available at http://www.granat.com/legalservice.html)
Hokkanen, J. (1999). Investing in Technology: A Business Framework.Managing Partner, September
1999. Volume 2, No. 4, 8–13. (Available at http://www.llrx.com/features/investing.htm)
Katsh, M. E. (1989). The Electronic Media and the Transformation of Law. Oxford University Press:
New York.
Katsh, M. E. (1995). Law in a Digital World. Oxford University Press: New York.
Lauritsen, M. (1990). Delivering Legal Services with Computer-based Practice Systems. 23 Clearinghouse
Review, April 1990, 1532–1539.
Lauritsen, M. (2001). Lawyering for Tomorrow: Technology and the Future of International Law
Practice. In J. Drolshammer and M. Pfeifer (eds), The Internationalization of the Practice of
Law, 411–421. Kluwer Law International: The Hague.
Maister, D. (1997). Managing the Professional Service Firm. Simon & Schuster: New York.
Capstone Practice Systems Marc Lauritsen
Harvard, Massachusetts
E-mail: marc@capstonepractice.com