Legal Mosaic Essays on Legal Delivery

<strong>Legal</strong> <strong>Mosaic</strong>: <strong>Essays</strong> on <strong>Legal</strong> Delivery
Lawyers, Cabbies, and Uber
Lawyers and cabbies have several things in common: (1) if their meter
is not down, they are not generating revenue; (2) most cabbies don’t
own their medallions, and the vast majority of attorneys are not equity
partners in their law firms; (3) both groups operate in economic
models that are strikingly similar: owners benefit when their ranks of
cabbies — or lawyers — are working “with their meters down” and
(4) statistics show that lawyers and cab drivers have disproportionately
high rates of drug abuse, alcoholism, depression, and a host of other
maladies. And as if that’s not enough, there’s something more to heap
on: Uber.
Uber? It has become an existential threat to cabbies to be sure, but is it
a shared threat to lawyers?
The Collaborative Economy
It is not the threat of Uber per se, of course, that looms over lawyers
but, rather, the “collaborative economy” that Uber personifies. The
term describes a new economic model built on distributed networks
of connected individuals and communities rather than centralized institutions.
In the shared economy model, individuals are connected to
communities by technology that enables them to deploy underutilized
assets the community can tap into in real time and cost effectively.
Translation: technologically, it is the glue that connects providers to
consumers, cutting out the traditional delivery infrastructure and providing
faster, cheaper, and more efficient alternatives to the incumbent
economic model. Call it disruption. Cabbies have it in their windshield.
But is this apposite to lawyers?
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