the death of the giant firm? (Work in progress)
Since our grade is partly based on whether we’re ethical, I must credit Sandor for arguing that the legal product includes trust, and Justin Colannino for predicting that Wexis will be assimilated into Googles and Wikipedias.
Now that I'm going online to upload this, I just discovered i got a b minus in torts, so take my arguments with a heavy dose of skepticism.

Eben believes that law firms will be extinct by the time we inherit them. I have my own opinions on what made giant firms so successful, and what could make them obsolete.

The richest corporations want their legal work mass-produced and custom-fit. Big firms accommodate these clients by exploiting economies of scale. The deep bench supplies apprentices to do drudge work for their mentors, and many specialists packed under one roof cross-pollinate their ideas, as at interdisciplinary research universities or think tanks.

I believe that Eben believes that the efficient trade in information will abolish the ownership of symbolic representations, materially, and then legally. Then the brokers and networkers of creative thought will become obsolete. Blogs broke the media conglomerate’s monopoly on distributing news. Recording companies will go the way of switchboard operators. Middle Management is being crushed by flattening corporate hierarchies. The continental investment banks ceded power to an archipelago of hedge funds, run by irreverent geniuses like my three college classmates who started trading currencies together as second semester seniors.

By gambling on their own hedge fund over a hierarchical bank, perhaps these friends were selling short our industry too. Perhaps the same centrifugal force will disintegrate giant law firms. Certainly, raw jurisprudential data will be free one day, perhaps when some Robin Hood scans in the entire written Westlaw and Nexis registers, then writes a Google-like algorithm to organize it into Wikipedia-like linked pages. Lone-practitioner Davids will keep pace with firm Goliaths by outsourcing drudgework to India or their cell phone.

But creativity will never be socialized, at least until someone invents mind-reading or artificial intelligence. Hedge fund managers will still struggle to predict capital flow from commercial data; managers will market and innovate; blogs will rely on reporters to formulate questions, anticipate the scene of the crime, and research non-symbolic facts; good musicians will always smoke pot and drop acid.

So what is essential to legal services, and what structure and scale will generate it most efficiently?

may reduce the law firm’s comparative advantage over the law market in brokering and networking legal ideas.

Those other innovations were in distribution channels—_ _ . The lawyer’s “distribution channel” is the neurons in judges’ and jurors’ brains. Those other innovations could be objectively measured: compare _ to the market __. But every legal case is unique

Sandor: PROBLEM:Reputation / black box SOLUTIONS: break open black box How much of our profession will be “opened up” in this way?

cf. Coase: market or firm? An innovation (here, internet) doesn’t just lower cost of market—it lowers cost of firm. And so firm may become consolidated (e.g. internal Wikis ...)

-- AndrewGradman - 19 Jan 2008

I'm not awake enough to address the main question, but I just want to note that Wexis may not disappear as much as add value to hang on--for example, headnotes, the key number index, and so on. The core of the judicial opinions--public domain--is increasingly available free on court websites and on Columbia's own altlaw.org, but until someone starts writing public domain headnotes and indices (or until someone develops a MUCH smarter search for law), Wexis will be here to stay (without even mentioning all the secondary sources that will need to be freed or still bought and made available in print). Anyway, until someone starts writing these for free, competitors will need to pay someone to write their own or pay West etc. and keep feeding them.

-- DanielHarris - 19 Jan 2008

Back to the original question Andrew posed: I'm not entirely sure why we should expect the death of the law firm anytime soon, either. Anyone have ideas about why Eben said this? Or your own thoughts on the matter?

-- KateVershov - 19 Jan 2008

I'll explain in more detail what I actually meant, which isn't what Andrew assumed, next Wednesday. For the moment, let me just restate it, which may help: Your generation, unlike all previous generations of lawyers in New York City, will be competing for daily bread against well-trained lawyers in New Delhi and Bombay. The savagery of leverage will soon make corporate finance practice and large litigation support--in general, in fact, the back office practice on which large firms currently thrive--a practice you can't afford to be in. The legal industry is going to look in future more like the garment industry, and more so at its top than it will at its bottom. The jobs that have been considered elite for two generations, and for which your institution is best equipped to train you, are about to globalize elsewhere, leaving a steeper pyramid with much less room at the top for people like you.

-- EbenMoglen - 19 Jan 2008

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