Delighted to contribute to this important volume filled with insights from many top global legal industry thinkers and doers.

Technology is transforming the legal industry. It is not replacing lawyers, but it is changing when, by whom, for what tasks, and at what price they are engaged. Many legal services that for generations had been delivered exclusively by lawyers are now products that obviate the need for direct contact with a lawyer. Technology is not a substitute for differentiated practice knowledge, skills, or experience, but it is narrowing the scope of “practice” and expanding the breadth of legal services that do not require lawyers and can be delivered as self-serve tools and/or by other professionals and paraprofessionals. Technology is used for a legion of ways that will promote efficiency, collaboration, predicting outcomes, managing risk, replacing “hunches” with data and metrics, mining institutional knowledge, expanding access to legal services, promoting the rule of law, and improving legal delivery by reducing the speed, cost, and transparency of delivering legal services.

This chapter examines the resistance that technological adoption has met in the legal industry and the ambivalent reception it has received from law firms. The pushback from the legal profession has been cultural, regulatory, and a reluctance to adopt. Many lawyers regard technology not only as an existential threat to their careers but also as a profound threat to their economic model. Law firms have grown and thrived with an economic model that operates on labor intensity, a pyramidal structure, and a virtual monopoly on elite legal talent. The asymmetrical knowledge and expertise that enabled lawyers to control legal delivery have ceded a growing segment of its monopoly to technological, process, and project management expertise. Law firms sold one thing: legal expertise. Technology has changed that. Legal delivery now involves legal, technological, and process/project management expertise. That has opened the door to new competition, regulatory circumnavigation, a growing willingness among legal buyers to embrace new providers, institutional capital investment in legal technology and non-law firm providers of legal services, and a new brand of “legal professionals” that do not hold law licenses.

Paradoxically, the deployment of technology in place of labor-intensive use of high-priced lawyers has placed a premium on human skills. Judgment, empathy, client skills, and the ability to collaborate with other professionals, paraprofessionals and machines is more important than ever. Technology is reshaping what it means to be a lawyer and how they will function. At the same time, it’s reminding the legal profession how important “people skills” really are.