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The Coming Tsunami in the Legal Profession

By William C. Cobb
May 01, 2016

There have been four waves of change over the last 50 years. We are now entering the fifth wave and this one will be a tsunami. The lawyers who do not recognize the trends will not be able to enter a new era and survive. The fifth wave will turn partnership leverage, compensation systems and the business model upside down. There is not much time to make the incremental changes that will support sustained profitability in law firms. Many firms will be acquired out of existence.

Introduction

Picture yourself driving up to the office in 2020 (just four years from now), telling your car to “go park” and then walking into your office. You are greeted by “Nadine,” a robot tied into social media and into IBM's Watson. She has already prepared the management reports through yesterday, communicated with the other Nadine robots that work for the partners on the status of each case in the office, and updated the files on each client with current events. Your firm has had to let many of the administrative staff, para-professionals, and associates go because all of the work they were doing is now being done by these “nice” robots. (Forbes reported in December 2015 on this quote from Jeff Greene at the Conference on Inequality: “What the global economy did to the blue collar worker ' big data, artificial intelligence and robotics will do to the white collar economy.”)

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