Richard Susskind

Richard Susskind’s keynote address is now available on the ABA Tech show site: http://www.abanet.org/techshow/docs/2009/keynote.mp3

For those of you not familiar with Susskind, he is a noted visionary in legal services space and author of The End of Lawyers. As with all good messages, this one bears repeating.

One of the key points of his address that I particularly noted was that with the standardization of legal services, the client benefits in three ways. First, direct costs go down. Second, costs become much more predictable. Cost predictability is increasingly more important to clients. Finally, and most intriguing to me personally, the quality of services actually increase. The reason for this is that when certain services are standardized, many experts are brought together to pool their expertise leading to much more comprehensive solutions than would otherwise have been possible with a single lawyer.

Overall, the address is very thought provoking about the future of legal services and is definitely worth checking out.