Any way this market can be disrupted? Maybe through some more efficient/decentralized/AI-based services that would do much of the lawyer's jobs, forcing them to reduce their billing rates?
Lots of people are trying (including me) in many different ways. No doubt technology can help in various ways, but I think the single most promising change is top-notch lawyers breaking away from megafirms to start their own smaller shops with a much leaner cost structure. That's what I did, but I didn't want to make the article all about tooting my own horn.
You mean like Lexis, Westlaw, LoisLaw, LegalZoom, and RocketLawyer have been doing for the past decade or so?
The problem is that at some point, you're paying a premium for a lawyer's skill in knowing what to do and for taking on the risk of being wrong, since you can sue the lawyer for malpractice if they fuck up.
Think of it like programmers: with all that open source code out there and all those GUIs, programmer's rates should be going down. Instead they're going up (at least for the good-to-great programmers): once the market has corrected for reduced costs, it readjusts upwards to correct for increased competition for talent.
The irony is that BigLaw was the disruption -- the standard legal model until the 1960s was to have small, local firms. What we think of today as mid-tier firms would have been considered behemoths in those days.
