Is 2011 the Year of the Free-Agent Lawyer?
2010 was the year of law firm outsourcing, as firms increasingly sent their administrative and routine legal work to offshore and nearshore locations, according to Canadian legal consultant Jordan Furlong.
He ticks off the developments at Law21, including WilmerHale’s outsourcing of back office work to Ohio and Thomson Reuters’ acquisition of legal process outsourcing company Pangea3.
What about 2011? It will become the year of the free-agent lawyer, Furlong predicts. Lawyer work will shift “away from full-time associates and towards independent, unaffiliated, networked and mobile practitioners,” he writes.
The new legal model will be based on contract lawyers who are retained for specific projects then released back into the market, he says. That means less security and lesser pay for lawyers, but it also means more flexible schedules, greater opportunities for specialty niches, and more freedom to develop individual career paths.
Furlong sees implications for law schools, which have adopted a business model that assumes loans for their high tuition fees can be quickly paid off when grads land high-paying jobs. In the end, he predicts, fewer law schools will survive.
Furlong also foresees conflict-of-interest problems as lawyers jumping to different employers will accumulate more conflicts at a faster rate. “If the current rules on conflicts of interest are maintained and enforced, these lawyers will rapidly find themselves ethically obliged to turn down work, eventually becoming effectively unemployable,” he writes. He wonders if the result will be a two-tier ethics system or “the collapse of an already unwieldy conflicts regime.”
Hat tip to Legal Ethics Forum.
