Legal Mosaic Essays on Legal Delivery

<strong>Legal</strong> <strong>Mosaic</strong>: <strong>Essays</strong> on <strong>Legal</strong> Delivery
ple of Picasso’s late Cubist style. In Cubism, the subject of the artwork
is transformed into a sequence of planes, lines, and arcs. Cubism has
been described as an intellectual style because the artists analyzed the
shapes of their subjects and reinvented them on the canvas. The viewer
is left to reconstruct the subject and space of the work by comparing
the different shapes and forms to determine what each one represents.
Through this process, the viewer participates with the artist in making
the artwork make sense .It is for the audience to cobble together
the multitude of seemingly disparate images and elements to represent
the subject in a greater context. This appears to be the approach that
many legal pundits are taking to the way they paint the current legal
landscape; they translate the once monolithic legal topography—one
where a law firm “handles the case” start to finish (including back office
functions)—into a cubist rendering that identifies and isolates different
parts of the process that now include additional providers outside
the firm. Each provider in the supply chain is analyzed exhaustively,
but the viewer—as with the cubist painters-- is left to make sense of
these seemingly disparate actors in the supply chain and, more particularly,
how they mesh.
Let’s start with a term that has come to frame the discussion of the legal
industry:
Unbundling
Unbundling is a neologism initially used to describe how the ubiquity
of mobile devices, Internet connectivity, consumer web technologies,
social media and information access in the 21st century are affecting
older institutions such as education, broadcasting, newspapers, games,
shopping, etc. These new devices break up the packages (think: law
firm “handles the case”), replacing them with particular parts at a scale
and cost unmatchable by the old order. Unbundling has been called
“the great disruptor”.
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