Books, Career Center, Career Files, Pre-Law

From the Career Files: Summer Reading List -- Tomorrow’s Lawyers

Whether you're looking to join the legal profession or currently practicing law, you should read this book.

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Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from the ATL Career Center’s team of expert contributors. Today, Alison Monahan shares some practical advice with future and current lawyers on what they should be reading this summer.

Looking for some summer reading? Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future (affiliate link) is short enough to read in a few hours as you lounge in a hammock, but has enough heft to keep you thinking for much longer.

Who Should Read This Book?

Whether you’re considering applying to law school, you’re starting soon, you’re currently in law school, or you’ve already graduated, Tomorrow’s Lawyers is a must-read.

So, pretty much, it’s a must-read for anyone who’s in the legal profession currently, or who’s thinking about joining.

Why? Because Richard Susskind has written a short, readable introduction to the many challenges and opportunities the profession will face in the next 30 years (aka, the length of your legal career). Ignore him at your peril….

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What’s the Book About?

The rather ominous subtitle sets the stage: An Introduction to Your Future.

Susskind identifies three “drivers of change” that he argues will drastically alter the legal profession in the coming years:

    1. The “more-for-less” challenge;
    2. Liberalization; and

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    3. Information Technology.

Liberalization

Susskind lives and works in the U.K., and for the moment factor two is more relevant there than in the U.S., where the ABA has so far declined to support anything akin to the Legal Services Act 2007, which opened up the U.K. legal market to non-attorney ownership of law firm-like entities.

But the book makes some interesting arguments in this regard:

    1. How long until U.S. law firms find themselves at a competitive disadvantage, unable to raise capital to compete with well-funded legal entities elsewhere?
    2. And, similarly, how long before GCs in global businesses start to wonder why outside counsel in more traditional locales can’t provide the service innovations possible in more liberalized jurisdictions?

If I ran a law firm, these questions would keep me up at night.

How To Do More with Less?

Regardless of jurisdiction, it’s hard to argue with his other two points.

Read more at the ATL Career Center….

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