Legal Mosaic Essays on Legal Delivery

<strong>Legal</strong> <strong>Mosaic</strong>: <strong>Essays</strong> on <strong>Legal</strong> Delivery
no longer sufficient to identify and to draw attention to the component
parts; now, their interaction must be expressed.
Who Will Be The Next Reggie Jackson?
“Mr. October”, Reggie Jackson, was asked what he saw as his role on
the 1977 New York Yankees who went on to win consecutive World
Series. He remarked with characteristic modesty, “I’m the straw that
stirs the drink.”
In moving beyond a cubist view of the legal landscape, more focus--and
training—should be given to “who is the straw that stirs the drink?” in
the legal delivery model. There is an ever-expanding list of service and
product providers jockeying for market share. To reap the benefits of
this unprecedented surge of new market entrants and competition in
the marketplace, it is time to move past identifying and dissecting the
list of individual provider options and to focus on who will put them
together and by what means.
Put another way, who will be responsible for managing the integration?
If it is to be lawyers, then this calls for a different arsenal of skill sets
than have traditionally been provided by law schools. As noted, lawyers
are already working more frequently with a cadre of para-professionals
as well as with professionals from other disciplines. And should
the regulatory climate in the U.S. change as it has across the pond, that
dynamic will surely accelerate. The discussion should be focused on
what it means to be a lawyer in the rapidly evolving legal marketplace.
Law firms will continue to change as many of the tasks they had formerly
performed (basic legal research, deposition summaries, sifting
through production responses) are already being conducted by other
providers with whom they must now compete and/or collaborate. So
too will many of the services law firms now perform—such as contract
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