Law's Big Challenges Cross Borders and Common Resources Can Help Solve Them

"The legal industry has several wicked challenges: access to justice; legal education and training for a rapidly changing marketplace; enhancing delivery and improving consumer satisfaction; aligning the appropriate resource with task; and defending the rule of law. The industry’s common challenges eclipse geographical, cultural, practice, and regulatory differences. That’s the biggest takeaway  from a month-long speaking tour across Europe. Similar challenges exist in North America, Asia, and other parts of the world.

Another takeaway is that there is an emerging global legal community  more diverse, customer-focused, socially committed, inter-generational, multidisciplinary, and innovative than the parochial, homogeneous, lawyer-centric one that it is supplanting. Law—like so many other industries—is undergoing a transformation that self-regulation cannot stanch. Change has been fueled by the confluence of the global financial crisis and its reboot of the buy-sell dynamic; the impact of technology on how we live and work; and globalization. The legal guild is morphing into a digitized marketplace where lawyers are no longer the sole providers of legal services and customers drive the bus. Across Europe and around the world there is palpable energy- and capital—invested in transforming legal delivery and addressing the industry’s key challenges..."

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