Legal Mosaic Essays on Legal Delivery

<strong>Legal</strong> <strong>Mosaic</strong>: <strong>Essays</strong> on <strong>Legal</strong> Delivery
Towards A New Model of
<strong>Legal</strong> Delivery
A “Selfie” of the Current <strong>Legal</strong> Landscape
The legal field is in a state of flux—many would say decline. I prefer reconfiguration.
The forecast is bleak. There’s considerable evidence to
support the glum outlook: law school enrollment is declining; student
debt is escalating; the job market for lawyers—newly minted and oldhands
alike-- is the worst it has been in decades, and even lawyers with
jobs are generally dissatisfied and anxious about their future.
A great deal has been written about the legal industry’s woes—the causes
for its decline have been sliced and diced with Ginsu-like precision. The
reasons are by now well-known even to those who only casually follow
the legal vertical--the effects of technology and outsourcing (as well as
“in sourcing”), the dizzying array of “alternative providers” encroaching
on what was once the exclusive domain—and revenue source—of law
firms, the impact of the U.S. regulatory scheme in contrast to the UK,
as well as the sustainability vel non of the current law school curriculum
where the consensus—and market response-- is that graduates are not
“practice ready” and clients are no longer willing—as they once were —
to pay for on-the-job-training. This segmented depiction of the legal marketplace
is reminiscent of the cubists; perhaps it is time to move beyond
that to a more post-modern rendering of the legal landscape.
The <strong>Legal</strong> Delivery Model and the Cubist Perspective
When Picasso and Braque pioneered the cubist movement, they radically
altered both the artist’s rendering of a subject as well as the viewer’s
process of interpreting it. Let’s consider “Three Musicians”, an exam-
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