The unbundling of legal services was allowed as legal ethics rules relaxed and lawyers were no longer required to provide all legal services to their clients. Unbundling created a whole new playing field for the profession, like We the People, established more than 25 years ago to provide legal documents to those unwilling or unable to pay for a lawyer.

And the bricks-and-mortar legal business of We the People has been put in shadow by Internet-based legal services such as LegalZoom, started in March 2001.

Outsourcing is a sore topic for any industry as domestic jobs are lost to foreign competition. Perhaps the best known of these services is Pangea3, first based in India and founded in 2004 (and now owned by Thomson Reuters). Law firms have outsourced domestic document review work, IT support and other former in-house jobs to foreign and domestic outsourcing partners. Nearsourcing has not gained the notoriety of its foreign cousin, but some BigLaw firms have found consolidating back-office services in less expensive locations—as Nixon Peabody did in Rochester, New York, in 1999—to be a viable business practice.