Disappearing MiddleMan/Mystique - Shrinking BigLaw More than Just Economic Pressures

Proskauer Rose adds 35 associates and 25 staff members to the body count.

But those layoffs are no longer the story.  The story in BigLaw is or should be the same one that's playing out in BigPublishing, BigMedia, BigPR, and BigReligion.  That's the disappearing function of the middleman and the power of mystique. 

Digital technology - and the transmission of information, insight, contact points for open-source-type help, and influence it makes possible - has deep-sixed the need for publishing houses, mainstream media, conventional public relations, and organized religion.  With the middleman out of the way, the mystique collapses about the so-called expertise involved in those old-line professions.  For instance, even insecure blue-collar-background me realized that I could be my own publisher, become THE media, promote myself [personal brand] as well as my startup clients, and put together a spiritual program that has kept me stable, even in these lousy times.

BigLaw is next in line for the unmasking of the wizard of oz.  Though we're at the still-stumbling stage, we citizens are embracing pro se litigation in a big way.  Eventually some entrepreneurial attorneys will establish digital resources which provide us with federal, state, and local guidelines, especially on procedures, on how to proceed with our legal affairs, including course correction.  Yeah, look forward to those FAQs on legal strategies and tactics: If your opponent does this, here are your options ...

Already packaging of class-action litigation has come of age. A handful of smart, shrewd attorneys can do the packaging of how the lion's share of class-action suits will be argued in court.  Most likely this will turn into a niche within law.  And that handful of attorneys will own the territory. As a result, there's no longer a need for a cast of hundreds in a law firm to start the litigation from scratch.  Parties in the litigation will know this.  They won't pop big bucks for off-the-shelf legal approaches.  Could be they might even go for it as pro se litigants who simply purchase the kits.

In-house legal departments are pulling in more work, particularly as purchasing of legal services become centralized in many corporations.  The General Counsel could emerge as a hero of cost-control.  Leave it to the businesspeople, even if by training they are attorneys, to figure out how to streamline and simplify every aspect of legal work. Corporate America did that brilliantly with reconfiguring how those former middle-management tasks didn't need to exist any more.

Also, all experts are taking on the chin.  It's a crisis of confidence.  Those who position themselves as society's designated experts, whether it be in the field of law, medicine, or salvation, have painted a target on themselves.  Most of us who have tried to figure X out have figured X out.  End of story. 

Will we be in a state court as pro se litigants alleging that our foster children were severely injured by lead paint dust?  Very likely.  My hunch is that a plaintiff law firm is working on that personal-injury kit for proving landlords liable.  There have been double-digit million-dollar awards in lead paint personal injury suits against property owners. The investment in popping for the kit might be worth it. Then we can keep all the award instead of forking over one-third or more to a plaintiff law firm.

Of course, major corporations such as Sherwin-Williams and DuPont wouldn't take their legal matters into their own hands.  Jones Day isn't going to fold. The stakes are too high in public corporations.  Shareholders, for instance, could sue them for bungling the litigation risk.  But BigCorporate will be among the forces lessening the functions of all middlemen and the reverence for mystique.

Implication: Branding might become total anachronism.

Comments

[15Credits]

Guardian Angle made one of the best comments I've read in a long time.

I'm just finishing my first semester of law school and, more than anything, this has made clear to me how woefully unprepared the average person is to do pro se. Don't even think as big as big law. Think little stuff. Example, estate planning. How many lay persons know the difference between joint tenancies and tenancies in common? What about a fee simple determinable and a fee simple subject to condition subsequent?

Law is an exacting discipline filled with intricacies and arcane, but very precise, language. Not knowing the difference between the examples above makes a huge difference. A person who intends to create one can easily create another and thus end up with massively different effects.

Law is a profession which will never disappear simply because of its complexity. Too many important things ride on the law for most people to run with it on their own. For those who do, as Guardian Angle suggested, look up the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and good luck. For those who are sane, talk to a lawyer. To quote my property prof, "we know the magic words!"

[Guardian Angle]

Pro Se Litigants:

The government has already published your DIY kit, totally free and available at your fingertips... the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

You're Welcome.

[objection]

Pro se is not a threat to large firms at all. The only lawyers who might be threatened by such developments are lawyers who take care of routine tasks, that rely on doing simple things for a lot of clients.

But even then, it's going to be worth it, for example to have a guy who is on the phone with the insurance company every day deal with them in negotiating your car accident.

The bottom line is, most people figure that you have a better chance of getting a better outcome with capable representation than with less capable representation, and pro-se litigants who are maneuvering with the benefit of FAQs they found online have the worst representation imaginable.

Big firms' can also find ways to win cases that less capable counsel using less thorough approaches might lose, or come to significantly more favorable settlements than less capable counsel might negotiate. If they save the clients more in settlements and judgments than they charge in fees, then a high-priced firm winds up costing less in the end than cheaper representation.

DIY legal tasks may take some business away from the guys who charge five hundred bucks for a one page will that says "All to my wife." But that isn't BigLaw.

BigLaw may be somewhat threatened by foreign law outfits that can offer much more favorable billing rates for routine tasks like document review.

But the problem with using these places is that the client is transmitting it's confidential information to a warehouse full of reviewers in India who are working for peanuts.

One of these reviewers could steal inside information and trade on it or sell it to a competitor. Or they could steal emails from one of the custodians containing embarrassing personal information, and try to blackmail him with it. People who work cheap can be bought cheap.

Additionally, although document review is a routine task, accidental disclosure of a privileged document can have a detrimental impact on the case, so, once again, you have to trust your lawyers.

Anyway, to say that self-publishing killed publishing, PR and the media is a joke. Physical print is being replaced by blogs and websites, but mostly professional blogs and websites.

Very few books break out of self-publishing. A self-published author can't get stores to stock his books, can't organize a book tour, can't get on radio, can't get reviewed.

The same goes for self-PR. You can talk about yourself, but you have to find people who will listen.

[sparky]

there's another reason this post is wrong: the legal profession is self-regulating. in other words, it's not like, say, publishing: without a license you can only represent yourself in court. the upshot is that anyone who purports to give legal advice can be accused of practicing law.

the big law firm is a dinosaur, true. but its death will come about through the death of the clients who would pay the bills or some other structural change in the economy. and that has little or nothing to do with what most lawyers do during the day when they practice law.

[Theseus]

Practicing law at the level it's practiced at biglaw firms isn't possible without a legal education. It's not even possible for many who've received that education. It's hard.

Maybe if I need brain surgery, I'll just have some guy read something online and do the surgery. It'll be so much cheaper to eliminate the middleman.

It's incredibly arrogant to think you can just read something online and do a comparable job to biglaw attorneys. You can't. Believe it.

[Another crtiic]

N Hrab: or that you just bombed the wrong country.

Clearly the article shows the writer has no clue what BigLaw does. As the commenters point out, large law firms do not handle personal injury etc. While it is true some places are trying to lower costs by expanding in-house counsel, that does not mean that GC's are going into litigation. It means for smaller issues that the GC will handle it rather than hire out, but for complex litigation, for multimillion dollar transactional deals, some do-it-at-home kit will never suffice and its idiotic to think so.

[N Hrab]

Jane, if nothing else, these comments prove what all good bomber pilots know:

"When you start receiving flak, you know you are over the target."

[bumperstickerculturalphilosophy]

It's myopic to assume that the DIY model seen in the blogosphere will transform areas of human endeavor to which it is ill-suited. The model hasn't even done done much to the book publishing industry, despite your claim; publishing houses are suffering not because people are reading self-published books but because (1) people are reading fewer books, period, and (2) the media conglomerates that own them are demanding higher returns. This post smacks of the simplistic techno-futurism we saw a lot of in the late 90s, when people assumed that whatever happened on the Internet was bound to reinvent everything about the way people live and work.

[Agreed]

12:10 is correct.

Based on your post, you do not appear to have any understanding of what BigLaw means. Kits already exist for the trivial wills, personal injury, etc. type of matters. And, there are plenty of online resources that set out the local procedures.

None of that affects BigLaw. Those firms deal with multi-million dollar clients. Last time I checked, multi-million dollar G.C.s were not going to court on their own to litigate. The amount of work and resources needed to handle those matters far outweighs what BigLaw clients have in-house.

[anonymous]

bahahahaha personal injury suits and landlord liability? Are these the practice areas you think "BigLaw" focuses on? You contradict your own point when you say that firms like JonesDay aren't going to fold...what do you think BigLaw is? What your article means to (and should) say is that small law firms that deal with personal matters like wills and estates, divorce, negligence claims, etc. will become obsolete.

[let them eat pro se]

Check how many of those pro se litigants royally screwed themselves over.

I say let them eat pro se. It'll just end up generating more legal work at the end of the day, in bankruptcies.

[let them eat pro se]

Check how many of those pro se litigants royally screwed themselves over.

I say let them eat pro se. It'll just end up generating more legal work at the end of the day, in bankruptcies.

[critic]

this blog is perhaps the worst I've ever seen. The posts are long and boring, and you seem completely unable to refrain from injecting bs politics into almost every post.

For example, in this post your zeal for declaring the death of "organized religion" has led you to employ some bizzare logic that undermines your thesis. Digital technology has brought people closer to God? People don't have to go to church any more because they can just email Jesus?

Your observations about the publishing houses, PR, and other media are true (if not terribly unique or insightful), but Religion is a whole different kettle of fish. Like law firms and law schools, churches are more than mere middle-men. They are bodies of scholars and practicioners that create a set of ideas. In the case of lawyers, these are ideas of how the law should work and the best strategies for prevailing in disputes. In the case of churches, these are ideas of the nature of God and how best to live a good and moral life.

For these reasons, neither organized religion nor the legal profession is going anywhere.

He who represents himself has a fool for a client. He who thinks the path to God is though google is even worse off.

[thissucks]

perhaps some limited areas of law can be packed and sold as "kits" for pro se litigants, but BIGLAW exists for a reason and that reason isn't going away any time soon.

Just like doctors, lawyers are not middlemen. Law is not something one can master by a couple of days of reading of some kits

[Skeptic]

Not a good idea to go giving people who need legal advice the idea to 'do it themselves' or search for a quick FAQ on the net. As a lawyer, its a blackhole and will do many meritorious claims an injustice.